RTL-SDR for Satellite Weather on GOES16 – Image Capture – Telecommunications, Navigation & Electronics

Introduction

In the previous three posts we looked at planning for reception of GOES16 weather signals, signal capture and signal decoding. In this post we use a temporary dish support to receive GOES16 over a short time period by keeping the Viterbi error rate as low as possible. Due to the author’s location, a rigid permanent antenna installation is not possible, but good results were received. Again, the excellent procedures in Ref.4 & 5 were followed.

Procedure for Image Reception

Fig.4 Orient Antenna to Minimize vit(errors) & Packet Drops

A temporary mount for the L Band Dish antenna is show in Figure 1. The antenna was propped over the balcony such that the resting angle matched the polarization slant. The antenna was then manually moved to minimize vit(errors) which were easily brought down to below 350 resulting in few drops. The antenna was held for about 10 minutes and files were written as the packets were assembled.

Image Retrieval & Viewing

Fig.5 Filezilla SSH Session to Retrieve Rx Files

File.6 Filezilla Display Showing RaspberryPi4 Directory Structure

Filezilla was used to easily access the received images as shown in Figure 5. The GOES images are stored in the GOES16 directory and the National Weather Service images in the NWS directory as shown in Figure 6.