Weather Satellite Captures and Radio

This is a site where I upload my captures of weather satellites (NOAA 15, 18, 19, etc.). I also post stuff about radio in general.

Overview

Weather satellites in general take pictures of earth (most of them actually scan the earth like a fax machine) and then they transmit those images down to earth to those pepole who can receive them. There are two main ways of picture transmition: APT (Automatic Picture Transmition) and LRPT (Low-Rate Picture Transmition). There is also HRPT (High-Rate Picture Transmission), but that doesen't transmit on 137MHz band and becouse of that I can't receive it yet. Those two transmit on the 137MHz band. LRPT is the newer standart currently only used on Russian Meteor-M Satellites while APT is a standart from the 1960's, first used on TIROS-8 satellite. LRPT was first used on MetOp-A satellite, but it was later disabled after interfiering with onboard instruments. LRPT has a resolution of ~1Km per pixel, while APT has a resolution of ~5Km per pixel. APT is more popular due to it being an easier standart to receive, decode and get a usable image. Those satelites are also more reliable and common. There are only 3 APT transmiting satellites left: NOAA 15, NOAA 18 and the newest NOAA 19. Russian Meteor-M satellites are harder to decode, due to it's nature of being a digital standart, but produce higher quality images when sucessfully decoded. Meteor satellites are quite unreliable, often expiriencing technical problems and brakedowns. The two operational Meteor satellites are Meteor M2-3 and M2-4. M2-3 has suffered an antenna deployment failure, making LRPT reception more difficult. The M2-2 is only operational on HRPT due to a collision with an unknown object. All of the mentioned satellites are broadcasting HRPT (Except for MetOp-A, is decommisioned while MetOp-B and MetOp-C are still operational.)

My Equipment and location

Pictures from satellites.

Each satellite* has it's own page. There you can find pictures from those satellites.

Here are other pages that you can look into.