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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."
Fantastic! Now even when Weather.com is down I can still see what the weather is like without having to expose by pasty white skin to the elements.
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.
Now that you've "hacked" a weather satellite, how long till Ashcroft and Co. deem you an enemy combatant?
You should have just turned to The Weather Channel on digital cable when the site was unavailable.
"I am not a number!" - Number Six, The Prisoner
Along the same lines, a bunch of rich geeks over at SpaceX are building a rocket to go to space. Who needs NASA when you have a huge chunk o cash? Combine these two projects and you can start your very own space program!
-Valiss
Are available here.
Takes a bit more equipment, though.
I've been reading articles about how to decode these pictures since the 60's - I've got ARRL books and magazines going back at least that far. Hobbyists have been doing this with PCs since the late 70's. The transmissions are basically faxes, so it's pretty easy to decode with a sound card.
I know there have been some old news stories appearing lately, but really now...
Hacking weather satellites is lame. I want to hack the secret Illuminati Weather Machines and Plate Tectonic Control Grid...
Damn... where's my tinfoil hat>
Trolling is a art,
Things I want to do this weekend:
1) Clean the barbeque grill
2) Vacuum the living room
3) Build a weather satellite station
otherwise I don't see the point.
Now will someone post how I can build my own satellite and get it into orbit? :)
Once again slashdot stumbles upon an already popular hobby. http://www.scnt01426.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Articles /WXSAT/wxsat.htm
Even if I did build my evil master "weather" satellite station, the Dept. of Homeland Security would prevent me from launching my evil master "weather" satellite.
5 9&mode=thread&tid=159
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/20/13182
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.
You could just go to NOAA's Geostationary Satellite Server page and D/L the damn things.
I guess I have to turn in my geek card now...
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
When you can check the weather by going outside http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/cgi-bin/commerce. exe?preadd=action&key=ws5000
For those that think that Amateur radio uses
acient technology, look into the great space
stuff hams are doing..
Two way satellite contacts, contacts with the
space station, hand-held data transmission
via satellite.. pretty neat stuff..
check out AMSAT and the ISS radio page.
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.
I ported the wx200d communication code to BSD a year ago. Good software!
Pat
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.
From the article....
Combined with the bad weather of winter and the short days, the images from home were dark and short...
This is great- it doesn't work if the weather's rotten! how useful for a weather-watching satellite receiver....
This is mostly interesting because of it's unusual way of decoding digitally transmitted satellite data. The idea of using a sound card and a short wave receiver to decode satellite imagery is... quaint.
:) But it's not as if any of this data is particularly... restricted, or secret.
But why play around with that when you tap into the freely-accessible C-band T-1 National Weather Service downlink, NOAAPORT and get all the international surface obs data, text products, rawinsonde (weather balloons), Nexrad doppler radar, and supercomputing forecast model data for free?
Well, okay, this approach is less appealing as you need a high-speed RS-422 serial controller, a satellite demodulator, a dedicated Linux system, and a C-band 3.5m dish.
Cool hack, nonetheless.
Cool. This site tells us all how to "hack" into the TV stations and get back usable video using our televisions and a broad-band antenna.
Here's one of the first images done in 1926. Of course, this weather image didn't come from a satellite, but they've been doing this stuff for a long time!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The first setup used a geared motor driving a drum (made from a rolling ping) that had tinfoil wrppaed around, with electrostatic fax paper on top of that. It would print the image via a motor driven needle that put a high voltage current to the paper when it recieved a black portion of the image. Omni-directional antenna and a modified scanner completed the rig.
I wish I still had my copy of "The Weather Satellite Handbook".
73 de VE6LSH
You can use HamFax to do this under linux. Predict will tell you when the bird will be visible.
n et/kd2bd/predict.html
http://hamfax.sourceforge.net/
http://www.qsl.
73 de VE6LSH
Many of you already have what it takes to receive these satellites. Many police scanners such as the Realistic 2006 have an FM wideband mode that works just fine. Take the audio (data) out of the headphone jack. Simply try tuning your scanner into the frequencies in the article and set the scanner for wideband FM. Leave it for a while with the squelch just barely set and it's very likely that as the satellite comes over your horizon, you'll hear the 'tick tick' he speaks of. Usually a lower gain scanner antenna is best (Radio Shack sells a discone for about 60 bucks) because higher gain antennas compress the vertical lobe to get more gain on the horizon (and for space reception you WANT tha antenna to "look up" into the sky.
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.
Yep. They are, in effect, a publis service of the U.S. Government. Anybody who wants to can receive their signals and do what they will with them. The signal format itself is based on the 1960s-era TIROS format, but keeping it simple means that even dirt poor countries can get weather satellite data.
I do my own: have a look at some pretty (if a little stale) pictures of mine. I wrote my own sound card demodulator program. Linux, of course...
...laura
you can, it's called a 'mirror'. avoided by most computer geeks, due to undesireable side effect, it can be quite effective as a self monitoring device.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.