First attempt at receiving and decoding weather satellites…

November 25, 2007 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Science, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

Okay, this isn’t that impressive, but let me explain.

Received via my TH-D7A

Larger version of the same…

I recorded about 4.5 minutes of audio from one of the weather satellites, using my small pocket recorder and a Kenwood TH-D7A. In most respects, I shouldn’t expect anything good to happen. I’m using a cheap little voice recorder. I’m using a receiver that has insufficient receive bandwidth (this is probably the worst problem) and I’m using an antenna that’s tuned for a completely different band (still, the signal strength seems excellent). Still, all that aside, you can see the clear outline of Baja.

Well, I thought it was kind of neat. Makes me wish I had the right receiver though.

Addendum: I tried to record a few minutes of the satellite using the yagi and my old Radio Shack PRO-60 scanner set to wideband mode.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the right splitter setup, so I can’t track the antenna by hand as well, and it looks like I had some significant interference in the middle.  I only caught the tail of the pass, so I didn’t really get much, but it might indeed be better, even though the bandwidth is way too large.

Recorded with the Pro-60 in wideband mode…