This morning I decided to fire up the ultra cheap software defined radio (DVB-T dongle) so my PC could grab some weather satellite photos from the NOAA satellites.
If you haven’t heard- you can now buy a $10 USB device which functions as an all band radio receiver. Tonnes of freeware programs now exist to work with these signals. One fun use is decoding the weather images directly from the satellites. It is really a simple process and your PC can stitch together multiple images to cover a large portion of any area.
Here is a composite image which is actually 3 satellite passes today which were automatically stitched together and displayed. Not too bad for a $10 USB stick 🙂
I am using a commercial QFH antenna but you can easily make your own as well. If you haven’t already- check out my videos on the cheap software defined radios- the number of things we can receive is quite incredible!
Here is the website which my receiver automatically updates when I have it configured to receive the NOAA images.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/89861404/WXtoImg/index.html
Here are the tutorial videos I made so anyone can use these little software defined radios to receive satellite weather transmission easily.
Cheers!