It’s been a while since I had my VHF weather satellite receiver on, and pending a change to my VHF satellite aerials, I thought I’d fire up the receiver and see how things were. A few things have changed here.
I’ve got a new (to me) NESDR SMArt software defined receiver (SDR) with a chinese 32db low noise amplifier (LNA). I lost my turnstile aerial in a storm a while back, and I have occasionally received the satellite images on my 145MHz vertical collinear – but the results were marginal. Since I have a 9 element beam for 145MHz on a azumith/elevation rotator I thought why not make use of it?
The other big change is the software. As I’m Mac based, I’ve always used WXtoIMG to receive and decode the weather images – however there’s a relatively new piece of software called SatDump – available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Pi… and in my opinion, it’s a game changer. Satdump schedules the satellites, controls the receiver and the rotator, receives the signal, and decodes it! And it does it for all the popular satellites, both on VHF (137MHz) and on 1.6GHz. I can’t currently receive the HRPT hi-resolution images at 1.6GHz, but hopefully that’s about to change.
