Satellite weather image

You may have seen these weather satellite images (below) and you perhaps wondered how they were received and decoded. Well, actually it is not that tricky! The harder part is getting a good quality image. I will go through step by step covering what I have used, tried, failed at and also the various hardware, software as well as the different satellites out there. I should start out by saying that there are many ways to go about doing this. The NOAA satellites on 137MHz: • NOAA 15 - 137.6200 MHz (1998) • NOAA 18 - 137.9125 MHz (2005) • NOAA 19 - 137.1000 MHz (2009) The bandwidth is 36-38kHz and FM mode. If you set to 40kHz you should be safe. More on this later. The NOAA-19 APT image resolution is 4-km (2.5-mi). There are the ones I will be focusing on above. Others in case you are interested are: • METOP-A (2006) • METOP-B (2013) • METEOR-M N1 (2009) • METEOR-M N2 (2014) The newer Meteor line of satellites (M2 specifically) from Russia, which provides much higher resolution. As well as some geostationary satellites. The latter is perhaps a different article as I would not recommend starting with those. Geostationary Orbiting Environmental Satellites (GOES) Weather Satellites are: • GOES-13 (2006) 75° W “East coast view” - Not Active • GOES-14 (2009) 105° W on-orbit storage/Standby • GOES-15 (2010) 135° W “West coat view” - Not Active • GOES-16 137.2° W "West View" - Replaced 15 • GOES-17 75.2° W "East View" - Replaced 13 GOES satellites are very directional and use 1.6941...