Towards the end of a METEOR acquisition with the wonderfully simple V-dipole, I tried to improve signal by turning the antenna. That helped a bit, but I was surprised to find that lifting the antenna up changed the signal a lot. And it wasn’t just the higher the better: some heights gave better signal than others. Clearly, something more complicated was going on.

In this post, I’ll try to understand what happened.

In the previous post I talked about how I was mesmerized by the beautiful images radioed down to earth by the NOAA satellites. These use the analog APT system, which dates back to the 1960s. So clearly, there should be room for (digital) improvement.

And indeed there is, but there’s just one lonely satellite sending down higher resolution, digital images in the easy VHF band (137.1 MHz): the Russian Meteor-M N2. Decoding these images is quite a bit more complex than for the APT images, but you do get rewarded for your trouble:

When I learned that it is possible to receive images directly from weather satellites using a software defined radio dongle, I knew that was something I had to try one day.

I didn’t get to start trying it out myself until recently (Spring 2020), when I suddenly found myself with quite a bit of spare time.

I was very surprised to find that it isn’t that difficult and can be done cheaply. Here’s what I got after a weekend of fiddling around: