Receiving weather satellite transmissions

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By John Baichtal
Posted 2010/07/07 @ 6:07 am
Category General

Simon from Auckland, New Zealand, created his own station for receiving signals from weather satellites using a homemade antenna using coax and PVC. I really enjoyed his write-up, it’s very informative and contains tons of links.

In the Maker Shed

BeagleBoard BeagleBone Black

Makey Makey Standard Kit

Telegraph Decoder Kit by Spikenzie Labs

Arduino Uno Rev 3 (Make SMD Version)

4 Responses to Receiving weather satellite transmissions

gstrike on July 7th, 2010 at 9:53 am said:

I wonder why they posted the picture with no signal… heh. Make sure you click through his updates as he has much better success with his updates.

Also, I wanted to chime in and mention that I also have a writeup and pictures on how I tackled the same project using my Uniden Bearcat 780XLT.

My compliments! It seems you’re getting a better image than I.

My QHA writeup:
http://www.gregorystrike.com/?p=220

Sincerely,
Greg

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- Simon on July 7th, 2010 at 1:32 pm said:
  
  Hi Greg, your site is one I saw when I was researching my project. Nice looking antenna! I chose not to use copper pipe for my antenna since it’s so damn expensive here and the co-ax one was really quick to throw together to see if it would work. A solid copper one is something I am keeping in mind if my coax and PVC one proves too flimsy.
  
  Now I am getting good images the next step is to mount the antenna more permanently. It blew off my roof the other night in a storm! Not surprising since it wasn’t attached. Being plastic though it wasn’t damaged at all.
  
  I am now fiddling with an Arduino to make the control of the receiver more automatic. I wanted to do it with normal ICs but the chip count was getting up to 8 or 9 and it was obvious that this was the perfect project for a micro and some software.
  
  There is a definite buzz in receiving good pictures and thinking I am getting these from millions of dollars worth of technology in space!
  
  Oh, one thing I do to mark holes around a circular pipe is wrap a piece of printer paper around the pipe and mark on the edge where it overlaps itself. You can cut the paper off at that point. Then you can simple fold the paper over on itself to divide in half and in half again to get the quarters. Then wrap it around the pipe again and transfer the fold marks onto the pipe.
  
  Simon
  
  Reply ↓
Shadyman on July 7th, 2010 at 2:41 pm said:

Cool stuff! Always fun to see homemade antennas

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MadRat on July 9th, 2010 at 4:35 am said:

I’ve got a Uniden BC2500XLT and BC346XT. I’ll have to read through the article and see how hard it is do do these projects.

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