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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."

28 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Cabin Fever by The_Rippa · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Cabin Fever by SuDZ · · Score: 5, Funny

      Carefull, it's dangerous out there. You know, past the front door.

      SuDZ

    2. Re:Cabin Fever by SquadBoy · · Score: 4, Funny

      There are bears, bunnies, orcs, vampires and other dangers. The only real answer is to go out heavily armed and frag anything that moves before they can get you. Good advice my friend good advice.

      --

      Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
    3. Re:Cabin Fever by Anonvmous+Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      "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."

      Oh geez, don't you guys study history? There are several ancient civilizations that had very simple devices for determining the weather without actually having to go outside. All you need is a piece of glass, a rock, a hole in a wall (preferably leading to the exterior of your house), and a piece of glass to fill that hole and prevent everything but light from getting in.

      Hang the rock outside of this piece of glass using a string so that it's visible by peering through the hole. Installation's complete!

      That rock provides all kinds of scientific data you can use:

      - If the rock is bright, it's day.
      - If the rock is dark, it's night.
      - If the rock is wet, it's raining.
      - If the rock is white, it's snowing.
      - If the rock is shaking, there's an earthquake.
      - If the rock is swinging, it's windy outside.
      - If the rock is swinging and wet, it's a hurricane.
      - If the rock is gone, don't open the door.

      Pff who needs fancy schmancy satellites?

  2. 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Hacking Satellites? by DustMagnet · · Score: 5, Informative
      It's not hacking, since the software and receivers have been available cheaply for years.

      We use it all the time in Antarctica. I'm sure it is useful other places not covered by weather.com. You have to have line of sight on the sat, it has to have line of sight on the weather, so the range is limited, but good enough. The pixel size is huge, so it's no good for spying.

      It does do both IR and visible, so you can get the temp/height of the clouds too.

      --
      'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
    3. Re:Hacking Satellites? by Xzzy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > 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.

    4. Re:Hacking Satellites? by MerlTurkin · · Score: 3, Informative

      You can already receive sat images off the HF bands if you have the right gear. It's slow but doable.

    5. Re:Hacking Satellites? by tlahoda · · Score: 5, Informative

      You have to remember these are weather satellites. An extreme high resolution image is not yet available, even with professional equipment. The GOES series satellite have a 1km per pixel resolution for the current GOES 8 and GOES 10 satellites. In about 10 years 10m or possibly 1m resolution satellites are going up. With the American Goes satellites it will not be possible to watch the irag decimation. They simply aren't in a place on the Earth where they can view it, and GOES 8 will probably being moving even further away in April. None of the GOES data is encrypted or delayed so an instantaneous feed is available, but keep in mind it can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 45 minutes for an image to be completed depending on the region of the earth being scanned. Also keep in mind that you'll need software that understands the GVAR format in order to see the data from the GOES satellites. I work with these satellites everyday, it is non-trivial without the right software to use the data.

    6. 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.

    7. Re:Hacking Satellites? by GlassHeart · · Score: 4, Funny
      Is it really worth hacking a damn weather satellite when you can turn on any news station or hit weather.com

      This is just version 1, so it's kinda plain. Version 2 will enable writes, so you can modify the weather through the satellite.

  3. Echelon by Jedi+Holocron · · Score: 3, Funny



    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

  4. While you're at it... by Valiss · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  5. Much cooler images... by Rorschach1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Are available here.

    Takes a bit more equipment, though.

  6. This isn't exactly new.... by markana · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  7. Screw that.. by grub · · Score: 4, Funny


    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,
  8. Among Other Things by Davis+Bacon · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...you can build your own satellite weather station! Something I think all of us have wanted to do at one point or another...

    Things I want to do this weekend:

    1) Clean the barbeque grill
    2) Vacuum the living room
    3) Build a weather satellite station

  9. Other Resources by Noksagt · · Score: 5, Informative

    Once again slashdot stumbles upon an already popular hobby. http://www.scnt01426.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Articles /WXSAT/wxsat.htm

  10. 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.

  11. Re:OK... by Smallpond · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here ya go

    www.amsat.org

  12. Seen similar by Upright+Joe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:OT: Command line tool for grabbing WX data? by PatJensen · · Score: 5, Informative
    Buy an Oregon Scientific or compatible weather station, wired or wireless for around $200. Then get wx200d (http://wx200d.sourceforge.net) and install it. It has a plotting engine as well as a live client->server engine for using graphical clients to display live data.

    I ported the wx200d communication code to BSD a year ago. Good software!

    Pat

  14. 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.

  15. oh, the irony. by mshultz · · Score: 5, Funny

    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....

  16. I'm in! by Ratbert42 · · Score: 4, Funny
    ...this site tells us all how to "hack" into the weather satellites and get back usable pictures using our PCs and an AM antenna.

    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.

  17. You don't need this complicated a setup.... by Newer+Guy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.