GOES16 Weather Satellite – Signal Capture with Dish Balcony Mount – Telecommunications, Navigation & Electronics

Introduction

Last year I managed to receive GOES16 images using a temporary pole mounted dish (Ref.1/6). This was in early September. Shortly after this our balconies were closed off for repairs and only recently opened. I decided to make a more permanent dish mount so that I could receive images for several hours without having to hold the dish. As I write this, I have been receiving images for about 1hr, very exciting!

Signal Capture Procedure Review

Fig.1 You Tube Video GOES16 Dish Hand Alignment

Last week I tested the temporary balcony dish mount using SDR# and hand alignment. I was able to successfully show the 1MHz receive spectrum so I was confident it would work. This is shown in Figure 1. The mount was made with extra slats of wood from a piece of Ikea furninture (I love Ikea), along with the mounting pipe from an RCA UHF TV antenna and stainless hose clamps. It is very sturdy, but the antenna does move a fair amount with the wind plus their are some neighbourhood crows who are humongous and are always eyeing my balcony, so it will only be there as long as I am several feet away. As before, I made some small adjustments to the alignment using SDR#. Once a clear picture was received, I moved the RTL-SDR indoors and connected it directly to the RPi4 and left the SAWBIRD connected to the antenna with LMR400 coax in between. This worked very well last year.

RaspberryPi4 Software

Fig.3 “‘goesrecv -v -i 1 -c ~/goesrecv.conf” Output

Fig.4 “goesproc -c /usr/share/goestools/goesproc-goesr.conf -m packet –subscribe tcp://127.0.0.1:5004” Output

Fig.5 Filezilla SSH Session to Retrieve Rx Files

File.6 Filezilla Display Showing RaspberryPi4 Directory Structure

I followed the same procedure as I did last year. I connected my RPi4 to the network and used PUTTY to access it as in Figure 2. Then I ran the goesrecv command as shown in Figure 3. This showed VIT errors at about 350, a bit higher than last year, but no packet drops. Then I used PUTTY again to run another command goesproc as in Figure 4 to print out the received images. I downloaded the images to my laptop via Filezilla as shown in Figures 5/6. The images are crystal clear and astounding, that is all I can say – Figures 7/10.