Ham Radio - My local setup for receiving NOAA weather satellites. 

Ps.. I have been trying this out since your last video. Either I’ve had time or a satellite is in range but not both. Hoping to get lucky this weekend.

Part of the reason this video was a bit late. I had to wait more than a day a few times, to get everything in sync with a pass. And remember to set an alarm. :-)

I linked my video on it in the description. Pretty easy to build and a solid performer on 2. You'll be pleased with it.

Those were the satellites I was receiving, 15, 18, and 19. They're not geosyncronous.

@@loughkb Sorry. It's been a while since I looked into this and I had my numbers wrong. I think 16 and 17 were the ones I was thinking of.

@@Kilroy01 I'll look into it.

I think they are harder to receive due to the 22k miles distance. I have a 7' dish I want to set up with a SDR for that purpose.

Yeah, pretty much the latter, as I kind of summed up in the vid. With the slimjim up, I'm on 2 meters most of the time. Only have to move the coax to the other radio if I want a sat pass. It works well enough to fill the need. Turnstyle, cross dipole, the helix version, they're all pretty much unity gain antennas I think, like the dipole. They should all perform pretty close to each other. I still might build one down the road, to see in real life. :-)

Also, the longer it took the satellite to lose signal at the edge of the map tracker is like literally proof that the flat earthers are a bunch of weirdoes

You may have missed the previous video where I used a webSDR over in Europe to capture a pass at night. In the decoded image, you see two copies. I think the one on the right is infra red.

There's a raspberry pi build for doing just that.

@@loughkb Perhaps that would make a good video?

County issue is resolved. I'm safe to stay through the summer.

@@loughkb Hi Kevin, That's great news. Stay safe. 73 WJ3U

Probably. I have one that I sometimes leave on to listen for gamma ray bursts.

Together, they should add up to about a half wavelength at the desired frequency. There are many formulae, for different measuring scales. For example, for calculating a half wave in feet, 468 divided by frequency in MHz. So at around 137 MHz on these sats, that's 3.4 feet total, or 1.7 feet each. 20.5 inches.

I guess that would depend on the particular criteria you measure 'better' with. :-) I don't have a lot of experience with SDR#. I played around with it a few years ago. I remember it felt 'clunky' like most windows programs. Not so much intuitive. I went to the docs a few times. GQRX seems to work more intuitively. The mouse did exactly what I expected it to do, if you know what I mean. I didn't have to think about the mechanics of doing things.

@@loughkb Thanks for responding. I have RTL-SDR. I will try GQRX.

Actually, I was pointing at the wrong spot on the map. I'm a bit further north, right under the null.

In my previous video, I linked the wiki page for noaa-19 in the video description, which contains info on the sensors it has. I've only received the image downlink.

Gpredict can also control GQRX to follow doppler automatically. I just didn't set it up. With the SDR, I can set a filter width of 40-60 KHz. If I used my icom, I don't think WFM mode is quite that wide. So I'll get a bit better image with the SDR.

Probably not. The null is due to physical characteristics, not resonance.

POP! OS 20.04. System 76's take on Ubuntu. As I showed in the video, Gpredict for tracking, NOAA-APT for decoding.

Nope, not me. (not yet anyway.) A loop antenna will really pick up the static electricity. When lightning storms pass within 10 miles of here, we can draw almost 1 inch arcs off the coax end to the landowners 80 meter full wave loop.

Way ahead of you. :-) Probably going to be this weeks video if they have the transmitter on during passes over the US.

Gpredict. It's available in the repositories for nearly every Linux distribution. I believe it's also available on windows and mac.

@@loughkb Thanks. I didn't see a Windows version. I found PreviSat, another open source app. Just started looking at it. Maybe others here have a suggestion for this.

Gpredict is available for windows. There's a couple of comments on this video or the next one with the download link. I think it's on the sourceforge page for the program under download. sourceforge.net/projects/gpredict/files/Gpredict/2.3.37/gpredict-win32-2.3.37.zip/download

@@loughkb thanks. I thought it was only for Linux. I actually much prefer Linux for day to day stuff. But so much radio software is only on Windows so the machine on my radio desk is Windiws. Thanks again my friend. Great video!

It can be run on all three platforms. Search for GQRX and Windows and you'll find instructions for installing it on Windows if that's what you're running. But you can use other SDR applications, it doesn't have to be GQRX

Honestly, if I were mobile, I'd probably take the laptop. I really don't like the limited interface on phones and tablets. I find them frustrating to use.

You were close enough. NOAA 15 - 137.6200 MHz NOAA 18 - 137.9125 MHz NOAA 19 - 137.1000 MHz

Up in the right corner of the program there's a little down pointing arrow. The tooltip says configure module when you hover the mouse over it. Click it and select 'configure' from the drop down menu. There will be a huge list of available sats, find the noaa sats and add them to the active column.

@@loughkb Thanks mate, been going a bit craz(ier) than I normally am (🤪😁) trying to figure it out!👍 L8R, & Merry Christmas 🎄⛄

But then it wouldn't bother the OCD folks. ;-) I've left it that way to see how many people notice. You're only number 4 to comment in the four years it's been the intro.

Yes. I showed that in a video a couple of years ago. I just didn't bother to set it up this time.