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Build Your Own Satellite Ground Station

Posted by michael on from the who-needs-the-weather-channel dept.

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."

5 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Hacking Satellites? by Dukeofshadows · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is it really worth hacking a damn weather satellite when you can turn on any news station or hit weather.com or wunderground.com and get global/regional/local conditions?

    On the other hand it would be pretty cool if you could jury-rig a means of watching the Iraq-US battle via satellite or find a way to make a de facto spy satellite out of it...

    --
    As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
    1. Re:Hacking Satellites? by Tackhead · · Score: 4, Interesting
      > 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. ;)

      Damn straight!

      My biggest pet peeve with weather newscasts is that they only show, say, eight hours of cloud movement. (You know, it looks like a frickin' animated .GIF. Blip, reset, blip, reset, blip.)

      That's all I need to guess what the weather will be like tomorrow.

      For geekitude, I'd like to have a screen saver looping, say, the last year's cloud movement, so I could watch the tropical storms develop over the Atlantic and Pacific, build in power, and dissipate over the coast, or the forest fires lighting up and spreading smoke until late fall.

      To do that and to say "Oh, my world weather time-lapse screensaver? Antenna glued to my flagpole, little dongle and A/D converter, and a cron job."

      Geekitude to the max.

  2. Building your own space program on $5k a day by Dukeofshadows · · Score: 3, Interesting

    North Korea's major ICBM apparently uses a mix of gasoline and kerosine for most of it's propulsion except for a small solid motor on the uppermost stage. If impoverished North Korea can build and launch a missile 2500 km w/ a theoretical 1000 lb payload (exact stats are at http://www.fas.org, I'm referring to their 1998 test) using aluminum, gasoline, and kerosine, why not apply the same tech and launch your own satellites for much less money than anyone else charges? Hell, if you made a quality pod and did serious testing on it (or just buy one from Russia), you might just be able to get someone into space and back for very low cost...

    --
    As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
    1. Re:Building your own space program on $5k a day by Rorschach1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The actual cost of rocket fuel is a tiny portion of your launch cost. And we've used kerosene before - the Saturn V F-1 engines burned it with LOX, if I remember right.

  3. Antic and STart magazine by digitalhermit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Years ago there was an article in the Atari magazines _Antic_ and _STart_ (for 8-bit and STs respectively) that detailed how to make a WEFAX (weather facsimile) device for pulling weather images off a shortwave radio. I was able to built it but never had a shortwave radio so the thing just sat there. You could supposedly purchase cassette tapes of the signal, but that seemed vaguely ridiculous.

    But using computers to do other things besides email and web browsing has always fascinated me. I'm now trying to get the GRASS system working so that I can create maps of my area. No luck so far, but success is imminent (I hope). If anyone knows of other projects that allow computers (running Linux in particular) to map the world, chart the weather, decode satellite images, etc., please let me know.