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Build Your Own Satellite Ground Station
kavachameleon writes "A site called Hobby Space has this article at which there are instructions on how you can build your own satellite weather station! Something I think all of us have wanted to do at one point or another, this site tells us all how to "hack" into the weather satellites and get back usable pictures using our PCs and an AM antenna. There are more instructions for getting geostationary images."
First off, I want to clarify that I did not RTFA.
But Just the synopsis and the fact that it's getting data from a gov't satalite, when your not an "authorized" recipient (i.e. not a gov't satalite station), makes me think that this might be taken as being illegal in some way.
Just my mode of think from having previous interactions with governmental information systems and running the red tape gauntlets.
Just my $.02
They aren't hacking satellites. They are just receiving signals... unencoded ones at that.
The only way 'hack' applies to this article is that it's kind of neat.
My high school physics teacher had something very similar to this in the classroom in 1993. I think he said the software and antenna cost him $175 if I remember correctly. There may have been an educational discount involved though I suppose.
The software he had was really slick it would even display IR data from some satelites over a photo so as you drug the mouse around, you could see the temperature of the pixel you were pointing to.
Just like in the example given in the article, there were times in which there were no satellites overhead to connect to, but I remember there being a large selection of sattelites that it would listen to including a bunch of foreign weather satelites.
I wish I had more specifics but that's all I can remember right now.
> Is it really worth hacking a damn weather
;)
> satellite when you can turn on any news station
no, but it's fun.
Dorking around with technology is the entire point of being a geek. If you have to question why these people shouldn't have done this, I question your geektitude.
It's like climbing a mountain.. just do it because it's there.
For those that don't want to worry about when the satellite is passing overhead and happen to live in the US (or thereabouts), consider EMWIN, the Emergency Managers' Weather Information Network. You can receive data by satellite, radio, or Internet. NOAA has links to schematics, free software (with source) and other good information.