How To Get Live Satellite Images Directly From Space

welcome back to the save it for Parts Channel recently my weather satellite videos have been getting pretty popular and a number of people have asked if I could do a simple step-by-step how-to guide for listening to some of these weather satellites now in most of my videos you're learning right along with me I'm learning new things I'm experimenting I don't always know the best way to do things but this one is going to try to be more of a simple breakdown of how to do the things I've already learned now we're going to go over a couple different options starting with the potentially simplest and cheapest option that almost anyone can do with minimal Hardware stuff you already have and possibly a small investment of 20 to 30 dollars in equipment I will also try not to use too many acronyms or technical terms and make things easy to understand I definitely still don't understand all of the technical details and I don't always remember what all the acronyms stand for so I'll try to make sure to say those out explain what I'm talking about and not make things too complicated so first off a little background on some of the satellites that I've been listening to lately there are two major types of satellites that I've messed with so far low earth orbit satellites which are generally around 500 to 1000 miles above the surface they orbit once around the earth about every 90 minutes or so and due to the curvature of the earth and the speed of the satellites any particular spot on the earth gets about a 10 to 15 minute window when it has a good radio signal and potentially a good view of the satellite if you want to actually see the satellites with your naked eye the best time is in the early morning and late evening when the sun is still down at your location on the ground but it's hitting the satellite in the sky so you have a nice dark sky and you get a nice reflection off the satellite solar panels and of course the very brightest one is usually one of the space stations the International Space Station or the Chinese space station then of course there's Starling satellites which often come across as a bright chain of Lights especially after they've just been launched and they're still all in the same orbit anyway um all of that stuff is low earth orbit so it's going over very close to the ground very fast relative to the Earth as some set of low earth orbit are polar orbits which go across north to south basically go over each Pole every day on every orbit and for weather satellites there's yet another type of orbit called Sun synchronous where the satellite is basically going around all the time in the same plane as the sun the Earth is rotating underneath that plane so the satellite's seeing a slightly different track of ground each time it goes around that includes the most common weather satellites that I look at know a 15 18 and 19. there used to be a couple other NOAA satellites but some of them have failed there are also some Chinese satellites and some Russian satellites that are in similar orbits but they're a little more complicated to listen to so to start with we're just going to focus on the US NOAA polar orbiting satellites now the other main category of satellites that I've listened to in the past which I'm not going to cover in this video is geostationary orbit and that is way way out here not to scale but a geostationary orbit is set up so that it rotates exactly the same speed as the Earth rotates so that the satellite is always looking at the same point on the ground all of your television satellites are like that your old school internet satellites like Star Band and HughesNet the stuff that predates starlink there's some weather satellites like the US goes uh geostationary operating environment satellite that's one that I've played with before but again I'm not going to get into it in this video because it takes a larger antenna it takes a lot more screwing around and it's not quite as easy for the beginner to mess with one thing people ask about weather satellites is why they're not encrypted and they're actually designed to be used by the general public by scientists in the field by people out on ships by weather forecasters By Radio amateurs the satellite signals are available for anyone to use anyone to decode and you can get a live view of the weather anywhere on Earth at least twice a day with that I'm trying to make sure I don't skip over anything here I might have to edit this a little bit and put some things in where they go as I mentioned the polar orbiting satellites are going around basically following the Sun as the Earth rotates underneath that satellite will pass over any given spot on the earth twice a day so generally you get a chance to see a morning pass and an evening pass now the passes are going to be slightly different each time so it's going to be a slightly different time and it's going to be a slightly different angle relative to you now those satellites transmit a variety of signals Down to Earth but the easiest for a radio amateur or a random civilian on the ground to pick up is in a VHF FM frequency so you can hear that with many Ham radios you can hear that with most radio scanners that you might have for listening to police and fire you can hear it with these 20 to 30 dollar bowfing radios that you find on Amazon and eBay as long as you have a radio which can listen in the 137 megahertz band you should be able to hear those NOAA satellites now I must note that you don't want to transmit on that band it's reserved for satellites it's illegal to be transmitting on that and it's usually illegal to transmit on one of these radios or a ham radio if you don't have a license if you just have an old police scanner sitting round that's probably the easiest and safest way to do it if you're using a radio like this it's a wise idea to disable a transmit frequency in the settings that's outside the scope of this video but there are lots of videos online and lots of info on how to reprogram these things and how to disable the transmit features if you're just using it as a scanner for listening when you listen to the NOAA weather Satellites with one of these radios what you'll hear sounds like a beeping tone and that's similar to an old style modem or fax machine it's sending down Digital Data in kind of an analog audio form so you're getting beeps those beeps tell a computer how to create an image how to create data it won't sound like much to your human ears other than beeping but that beep signal is a good indication that you have a good reception from the satellite how do you get those beeping tones into an image well there are a number of ways as I said I'm going to start with the easiest way which is to have your radio scanner and your cell phone and a sound recording app you'll also need an internet connection so you can process the files on a web page and so you can look up when the next satellite is going to be passing over your area the Android app I've been using for this is called wave editor once you have the wave editor app downloaded and you've got your radio you want to go online to a website called intoyo.com into yo.com it's somebody's ham call sign you'll probably get a map of the Earth right away showing the International Space Station but if you go up to the most tracked tab click on that you can click then on NOAA 15 18 or 19. you'll probably want to check all three just to see which one is coming over first I will note NOAA 18 seems to have the strongest transmitter so it might be the best one to start with but any one of those three should be good for your first try as long as it has a nearby pass once you've clicked on one of the satellites click on the 10-day predictions link and then you might need to click on All Passes the website defaults to visible passes if you're trying to spot the satellite in the sky but for hearing it on the radio you don't necessarily need to see the thing and you're more interested in when it's coming over and what elevation it's going to be at right in the middle of the data table you'll see the elevation and ideally you want the highest number possible you want that satellite to be as high in the sky as possible as directly overhead as possible and that will give you the best chance of getting a good signal then you want to look at the date and time and pick a convenient date and time for you sometimes it comes over late at night sometimes it comes over in the middle of the day sometimes it's early morning it just depends where you are and which satellite you're looking at find a convenient date and time with a high elevation number look at the start and end times write all that down look up at the top of the screen and write down which frequency you're looking at each of these NOAA satellites has a slightly different downlink frequency so you'll want to make sure to get the correct one for that pass then just wait for the start of the pass go outside to a nice clear area where you have a good view of a northern southern Sky if possible if you can get up on a rooftop or up on a hill somewhere without too many trees or buildings around that would be ideal if you're stuck in the middle of a city or a heavily wooded area you might not hear the entire pass you might just hear five minutes around the middle of the pass take your radio scanner tune it to the frequency that you wrote down and as the pass starts make sure your squelch is turned all the way down so you hear the hissing static noise that's just general background noise Cosmic radiation so you want to be able to hear that static you want to have your squelch all the way down because some of these satellite signals are pretty faint these battlefang radios have kind of a terrible squelch system but you can either go into the menu set the squelch to zero or you can just hold down this monitor button on the side you'll want to experiment with some different antenna positions generally I hold the antenna straight up and down the NOAA satellites are sending a circular signal so the radio waves are coming in in kind of a spiral and these antennas are generally a spiral of wire inside a stick so they pick up a pretty good signal just pointing up and down I've also noticed if I hold the antenna close to my body I tend to act as a reflector and concentrate the signals a little bit at some point during that 10 to 15 minute window when the satellite is going overhead you should start to hear some high-pitched beeps coming out of the radio it might be pretty scratchy and staticky at first but as the satellite gets directly overhead it should clear up and give you a pretty steady beeping noise once you hear those beeps pretty clearly you'll want to start recording a WAV file on Wave recorder you can just hold your phone up to the radio speaker once the signal starts to degrade to fade out to get staticky again you can stop the recording once you have the recording you'll want to export it as a format that the decoder can understand so in wave editor you want to open it go to export export a track you want your format to be Microsoft wave wav I think the default encoding is fine but the sample rate needs to be 11025 give that file some name you'll remember and Export it next open up the browser on your phone and go to apt dot open dash weather dot Community I'll throw that link down in the description and I'll do an overlay or something here part way down the page you'll see a choose file link click on that and aim it at that file you just saved you can leave the demodulation method alone and click decode there should be a little flashing satellite symbol on the screen and then if everything went well you should get an image at the bottom of the screen you can download that onto your phone if you want to blow it up edited or whatnot now your first try might not be a great image it might be skewed to the side it's probably going to be filled with patchy static but if you've got anything at all that's a great first try again there are some other ways you can improve this like having an audio cable you can have a computer hooked up to the radio instead of the phone you could do this other ways but I'm trying to show how you can get started with just your phone and a 20 radio from the Internet or an old police scanner from the thrift store so the next method to detect some of these weather satellites is to use a software-defined radio or SDR that's the little silver USB dongle there on the bottom the one I like at the moment is the RTL Str blog V3 they're about 40 to 50 online and the kit usually comes with a small tripod and an antenna that antenna at the top may be familiar to some of you who are old enough to remember television these used to be called rabbit ears technically it's a v dipole a two element antenna that can be set up in a V formation now this RTL Str is a slightly older one the current model I think is a darker color and comes with a different tripod I'll throw some links down in the description below if you want to buy one of those yourself I'm using an older Toshiba laptop that I pulled out of the trash at work it's got a broken screen and a few other problems but I think it'll work well enough for this project you don't really need any super fancy Hardware just something new enough to run some of the SDR programs with USB ports to plug in the SDR these software-defined radio devices weren't originally intended for hobbyist use or amateur radio use they were designed as a sort of USB TV tuner but hackers figured out that they can receive a really wide range of signals and the hobby for those just kind of exploded people have been modifying them updating them writing software to use them and putting out a little more consumer friendly ones with better antenna Jacks that are designed for hobbyist use this one in particular is a really nice one because it has that standard antenna Jack it's a pretty robust model and I would really recommend it there are definitely some cheaper ones out there and there's some knockoffs and clones so be careful of that when you're buying now this right here is really all you need to get started with NOAA weather satellites an optional extra you could use is an LNA filter such as the new Alexa bird NOAA and this is a combination of filter and amplifier so it boosts the signal strength that you're receiving while filtering out any extraneous signals any noise from FM radio cell phones Etc we're not going to use the sober device right now because like I said it's an optional extra I'm also going to be using a different tripod because I've actually just broken my little tiny one here so I'm going to throw this out we're going to use something a little bit bigger it's nice to have a slightly bigger tripod so you can adjust the height of your antenna it's not strictly necessary but the best reception I found is to have the antenna about 21 to 22 inches off of a solid surface like the ground or a flat roof or the roof of a car that's due to stuff called Ground plane and ground reflection which is a little more advanced for the topic of this video so we won't get into that too much for software we're going to be using SDR plus plus for Windows if we were on Linux I'd be using gqrx which I really like but not everybody's comfortable with Linux there's another one called Str sharp which claims to be more user friendly but is really a hassle to set up you have to install Microsoft virtual studio and sdks and drivers and all kinds of other junk that just makes the process slower and more painful with SDR plus plus you just download the zip file extract it and run strpp once you've plugged in your software find radio USB device you want to go over and select the source in my case I'm using the rtl-str down at the bottom and you should be all set you might need to also adjust the gain over there on the left side and you can just play with that slider until you see a good signal on a known frequency something like fm broadcast radio right now I just have that RTL SDR software defined radio plugged into the side I've got the antenna connected to that and it's just laying here on the futon to get some satellite signals we want to go outside and want to set up that antenna in a specific way I have heard of people listening to these weather satellites just through an apartment Window but for best performance I prefer to go outside or up on a roof if possible so just like last time we'll want to go to into yo.com pull up the satellites we're interested in in my case I know NOAA 15 is coming across in a few minutes and again what we want is the start and end time of the pass as well as the frequency to listen to NOAA 15 broadcasts its automatic picture transmission or apt signal at 137 0.620 megahertz so we want to go back over to our Str software and enter that in most of these SDR programs you can just click at the top or bottom of the numbers in the frequency display up at the top and that'll let you tune up and down you can also type in the number directly but you want to make sure you're in megahertz and not kilohertz or gigahertz so now we're tuned in to 137.620 and you'll notice SDR plus plus even tells you on the screen what you can expect to see in that frequency range right here it's polar orbiting satellites know of 15 18 and 19 as well as the meteor M2 series from Russia all use this approximate range of 137 to 138 megahertz next you want to take your TV rabbit ears fold them out to 120 degrees in angle apart from each other you might need to find a protractor for this or just copy the picture on the screen extend each side out to 52 centimeters or about 20.5 inches if you're in the U.S and now you have a NOAA satellite receiving antenna you can hold the antenna by hand or you can set it up on your tripod generally you want the open end of the V facing south if the satellite is going south or north if the satellite's moving North and it should tell you which direction on the n2io website you want your antenna to be parallel to the ground and again if possible about the same distance off the ground as the links of the arm so about 20.5 to 21 inches once you have everything set up out side your laptop your antenna and your SDR you'll have a couple more settings to change on your software you want to make sure you're in wide FM mode tune to that 137.620 or whichever satellite frequency you're listening for and go down to your recorder settings in SDR plus plus those are slightly farther down in the left panel so scroll down to recorder settings I do apologize for the cracked screen like I said this is a dumpster laptop we're operating on a shoestring here now you can choose baseband or audio if you record in audio it's more directly usable in a few different decoding programs but it might not be quite as good a quality if you choose baseband it's definitely a bigger file it's higher quality but it'll crash some of your decoding programs and it's a little less flexible to work with so it's up to you I'm going to start with audio for this one because it's just easier to deal with so as the satellite pass starts you want to watch your waterfall display that's the bottom half of the screen here and see if you can see lines appearing on it at the correct frequency you can listen to the audio as well and you'll hear those same beeps that we heard on the handheld radio I just have the sound turned off right now because we're just listening to annoying static and it doesn't make for a very good video once you do start seeing those spikes and or hearing the audio beeps you'll want to go down and click on record keep that recording running as long as the pass goes or as long as you see a good signal on the screen it might come and go during the pass so I usually like to continue recording towards the last half of the pass even if the signal seems to cut out earlier that way if it comes back in we might get several different pieces of the satellite image now just as with the handheld radio we might not hear the satellite right away it might take until somewhere in the middle of the past before we start getting a really good signal now the most important part about this is to be patient and be willing to practice because it might take you several tries to get it right you might also have to experiment with your antenna placement your signal gain other settings see what works the best for you if you're not getting anything one quick troubleshooting item is to check your antenna connections unscrew the antenna from your SDR check that the center pin is in place and hasn't gotten itself pushed back into the connector housing if the pin is pushed back in you can usually wiggle the cable a little bit to get it back out okay we're finally getting a decent signal you can see that Spike right in the middle and that nice sequence on the waterfall display you can also hear the beeps again so that means we're getting data from NOAA 15. if you're getting a lot of static during the pass you can narrow the filter in the SDR software that's the sort of Gray area around your Center frequency if you hover over the edge of the gray area you should get these two little lines click on that and drag the filter area until it's just around the signal that you're looking at you might also notice the signal decreasing in frequency during the pass that's due to Doppler shift from the satellite moving overhead so fast you can tune downwards slightly during the pass to keep that frequency centered [Music] so those files we captured either in audio format or baseband should contain the download from the satellite as it passed over us we have a couple different options for decoding that data and getting an image out of it some of the programs for that include NOAA Dash apt WX to image and sat dump I'll put the links for all three of those down in the description I'm just going to go through and show you how sat dump Works installing sat dump is almost identical to installing SDR plus plus we simply grab the zip file off the website extract the zip file in a convenient spot and run sat dump Dash UI there's also a SAT dump application that's the console command line interface and most people won't want to mess with that unless you're an expert at command line stuff now sat dump is very flexible and decodes a huge array of satellite files so you'll have to scroll through the list here and look for NOAA apt this one right here then you'll select the recording that you want to process we're going to start with the audio recording I think that was from a better pass so we'll just see what that looks like you want to set your output directory and we can just set that to the same place place our recordings live then you want to set the input level baseband or WAV file in this case we've got an audio recording and it's a WAV file so we'll set that to wave all the other settings down below should be automatically filled in based on your file so you should just be able to hit start as you wait for the progress bar to finish you should get a preview image in the upper left if the preview doesn't look like anything don't worry about that too much just yet wait for the rest of the processing to finish then we go over to viewer and there we go we have a satellite image it might not look like much right off the bat but you can play with some of the settings in sat dump and get different composite images out different channels sat dump has a bunch of really cool features but they're not always very intuitive so you might just have to play around a little bit to see what looks the best to you now remember we set our output folder to the same spot as our recordings and sat dump will actually output some other stuff as well as that initial image you see now sat dump much like some of these other decoding programs can use several channels of data from the satellite not just visible data but also some infrared information you'll also notice some of these bars on the side which sat dump tends to cut out these are kind of calibration marks that let you know how strong the signal was and some software can use these strips as an error correction to fix any drift due to Doppler shift now that's the basics of getting a satellite image directly off of one of the NOAA weather satellites it's not always a fantastic image as you can see here it's a little patchy it's a little staticky it's a little bit distorted it's definitely recognizable still now if you want to get a nicer image something like this which I also got from the same satellite pass there are a few other steps you can do on the right side of SDR plus plus you can zoom in on your signal until the waterfall display looks something like this now you can grab the edges of that gray filter area in the frequency display the same as before and try to narrow it until you're capturing all these side bands as well as the central image this can be a little more fiddly and you'll definitely notice the frequency moving due to Doppler shift so you'll have to sit there and babysit a little bit but if you've got the patience to keep tracking that frequency as it shifts you might end up getting a better image out of it another option you could do is just use sat dump for your recording and your processing apparently it will do all the same things as SDR plus plus showing you the waterfall display the frequency and letting you record the signals however I could not get that feature to work on my particular laptop you can use the exact same setup with the laptop the RTL Str and the v-dipole antenna and you can add in that sobird plus NOAA filter here here's an example image I grabbed from another pass using the exact same setup but I connected that sawbird amplifier in between the SDR and the antenna again that'll cost you another forty to fifty dollars you can buy or build a better antenna for example a qfh which is kind of this spiral helical antenna I have one up on my rooftop and it works pretty well you can combine the qfh antenna with the sawberd filter again I've got a sawberd filter Up on the Roof there and you can also use some software to automatically schedule and download this stuff for you so you don't have to sit there with the laptop you don't have to look up all the times online and you don't have to do it manually also Up on the Rooftop there's a Raspberry Pi computer in a waterproof case and again that's hooked up to the qfh antenna it's hooked up to that little sawbird LNA with some software called raspberry NOAA V2 I will also throw the link down in the description below there are a ton of other resources on how to do this there are other videos of people showing you how to do this there are websites walkthroughs text guides I will put some links to some of those down below so if you found my video completely incomprehensible and unhelpful check out one of those other ones and maybe that'll be better anyway we're going to wrap this one up feel free to throw some comments down below if you didn't understand something or want more information I do try to reply to all of those although if they're all the same question you might get a copy and paste response from somebody else that already asked thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time foreign [Music]

Channel: saveitforparts

Views: 464,916

Keywords: satellite, radio, weather, ham, amateur, diy, how-to, guide, simple, baofeng, handheld, vhf, scanner, sdr, rtl-sdr, amplifier, receiver, images, imagery, live, picture, photos, meteorology, science, infrared, download, orbit, earth, space

Id: icADyjm3PBE

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023