NOAA and Meteor Weather Satellite SDR with Raspberry Pi MEGATHREAD

[Eric]

I finally got around to setting up a Pi as a NOAA receiver and bonus- Meteor M2 receiver too. The best part- the work was ALL done for me this time! You have likely seen my older NOAA receiving and Meteor receiving vids here (sorry quality not great of audio) :
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... WWoKAFGgEo




I think the methods can still work fine (NOAA definitely can but I wanted a way to do this with a Raspberry Pi). Some of my older captures are still on my website even:

sat.JPG (385.22 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

So I found this amazing Git project:

https://github.com/jekhokie/raspberry-noaa-v2

Which I used this version: https://qsl.net/ve3elb/RaspiNOAA/ which includes a full Raspberry Pi image I flashed to a 16GB SD card with no issues. I followed their pdf instruction which is only to edit your basic receiver information (location, gains etc)

Here is the Raspberry Pi and USB SDR as it sits on my desk currently:

IMG_4425.jpg (388.64 KiB) Viewed 16431 times

I got the following NOAA images and this is not great.

Debugging needed:

NOAA-18-20220305-112104-sea.jpg (60.24 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

NOAA-18-20220305-112104-NO.jpg (66.19 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

NOAA-18-20220305-112104-MCIR-precip.jpg (79.02 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

[Eric]

After a few failed passes yesterday I made the final tweaks to the Pi setup by testing the actual sdr. This is right from their help files on the GIT repo whereby you can activate the SDR output to headphone and test some FM station:

rtl_fm -f 97.3e6 -M wbfm -s 200000 -r 48000 - | aplay -r 48000 -f S16_LE

Source: https://github.com/jekhokie/raspberry-n ... hooting.md

This proved my setup was good but the following images were even worse:

NOAA-19-20220305-191038-ZA.jpg (86.75 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

NOAA-19-20220305-191038-MCIR-precip.jpg (84.89 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

They not only had poor/no reception but also were cut off long before the satellite got to me. This is waaaaay far from my QTH. Then I figuured it out:

unknown.png (12.91 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

The passes for NOAA and Meteor sats were all nearly on top of each other yesterday. Not only do we have them stepping on each other but the tuner was not told which ones to ignore/prioritize (my job).

This is why they were cut off and poor reception More to come

[Eric]

Got it!

So this morning's pass of Meteor M2 was captured completely automatically and posted to our Discord server http://mkme.org/discord

The images are great except for some strange interference:

METEOR-M-2-20220306-072907-polar-direction.png (63.67 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

METEOR-M-2-20220306-072907-ir-122-rectified.jpg (307.96 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

METEOR-M-2-20220306-072907-122-rectified.jpg (576.26 KiB) Viewed 16437 times

I THINK it might be FM radio interference as it doesnt look to be a physical one (but could be). I need more data to figure it out but the easiest way is to just add a LNA and bandpass filter for 137 MHz.

I'll try to add that to the rig today and see where we land. I didnt need a filter or LNA in previous years but it is quite likely the noise floor and interference has gone waaaaay up on the last couple years since I was last decodign these birds.

[Eric]

NOAA still not working

NOAA-18-20220306-110902-NO.jpg (66.38 KiB) Viewed 16427 times

NOAA-18-20220306-110902-HVC-precip.jpg (151.82 KiB) Viewed 16427 times

I went ahead and updated all the files from GIT as well. Fingers crossed this gets NOAA working.

[Eric]

Caught the sunset from space. The gaps are still a problem and Im hoping the bandpass filter and LAN will help. Going to try the Nooelec 2 in one version and a homebrew too.

METEOR-M-2-20220306-185258-ir-122-rectified.jpg (37.51 KiB) Viewed 16410 times

METEOR-M-2-20220306-185258-122-rectified.jpg (30.99 KiB) Viewed 16410 times

[Eric]

So I'm still struggling to get NOAA to work. The antenna is fine so it is something with the SDR and it appears to be a sampling rate issue. In SDR# it works fine but I have to have the sampling rate pretty high for some reason. Will try a newer SDR soon.

Here is a shot of Metor M2 with the sunset directly in line with the shoreline where my town is. Pretty neat to see shots like these you cannot get any other way. Goodnight Earth.

METEOR-M-2-20220308-181318-122-rectified.jpg (304.98 KiB) Viewed 16363 times

[Eric]

Here is the updated hardware which now includes

RASPI
SDR
SAWBird LNA and Bandpass Filter https://amzn.to/3J07jlr
DC Block https://amzn.to/37ldDWY

Still no luck with NOAA but Meteor works great.

IMG_4465.jpg (258.8 KiB) Viewed 16363 times

[Eric]

This still didnt help with NOAA at all Meteor works great:

But every NOAA pass just results in static garbage. You can see at the edges of the image that it has no clue what is going on.

NOAA-15-20220312-081133-MCIR.jpg (66.11 KiB) Viewed 16305 times

Ive narrowed this down to a problem with the Raspberry Pi itself. I think the NOAA Pi image and decoding rely on it being a lower sample rate which these old ones dont seem to do well. I remember having to have the sample rate quite high on my windows box. Will swap to an E4000 modern SDR with a Raspberry Pi 4 model. If this doesnt work I am going to be pretty upset ha

[Eric]

That did it! With a new Raspberry pi 4 and the new SDR NOAA decodes perfectly. You can find them flowing every few hours in discord at http://mkme.org/discord

IMG_4501.jpg (331.28 KiB) Viewed 16303 times

Metoeor is now not working for some reason but the new install has NOAA 15, 18, 19 working perfectly from Ontario Canada.

Here are a few examples:

NOAA-18-20220313-122555-HVC-precip.jpg (109.58 KiB) Viewed 16305 times

NOAA-18-20220313-122555-NO.jpg (129.9 KiB) Viewed 16305 times

NOAA-15-20220313-084630-therm.jpg (101.55 KiB) Viewed 16305 times

NOAA-15-20220313-084630-sea.jpg (88.91 KiB) Viewed 16305 times

NOAA-15-20220313-084630-NO.jpg (122.66 KiB) Viewed 16305 times

NOAA-15-20220313-084630-MSA-precip.jpg (105.7 KiB) Viewed 16305 times

[Eric]

Got it!

I had to switch Metoer over from GNU decoder/receiver to RTL-SDR which apparently is a known issue for V3 SDRs so I guess mine is applicable. I might switch over to my old SDR again now to see how it works with NOAA on the Pi4 and then I can use GNU again. Maybe not though as check this out:

METEOR-M-2-20220315-085019-122-rectified.jpg (1.17 MiB) Viewed 16296 times

Check out the detail at the top of the image of the frozen rivers/lakes here in Ontario. They will thaw over the next few days when we get the sustained 16C weather coming.

I turned down the gain now as I assume it distorted due to gain when directly overhead. Should be an easy fix.

All from a Raspberry Pi and a USB SDR. Wow