Not a bad pass this morning – image displayed with HVCT false colour enhancement showing sea as blue and colours more indicative of land temperatures.

Getting back into weather satellite decoding after almost ten years. Plan is to have Raspberry Pi 4b display images decoded on a 7″ screen with Pi secured behind it. However first things first. Need to check I can decode the images on a PC.

Picture below is thermal imaging enhancement from NOAA 15 on a north pass pass at 18:42 local. Rig is a AOR DV-1 which has an ideal 30k filter but the recording output is only 15k discriminator! Antenna is a very low Diamond V2000 at around 2.5m so you can see the signal drop-outs (horizontal noise bands) from obstructions in the local environment. Software is the venerable wxtoimg pro edition. This is now effectively freeware though I paid for my pro edition back in the day. I couldn’t get the production copy from https://wxtoimgrestored.xyz/ to install under WIndows 10 but the beta version did and works fine.

Next up is to either get the V2000 higher or install the turnstile antenna I bought a year ago in a higher position. The ultimate is a quadrifilar antenna but that can wait until everything else is working. Software wise I’ll test a Airspy HF+ Discovery or SDRPlay SdxDx into wxtoimg via a virtual cable and also start building the software which is required on the Pi.