Monthly Archives: April 2021

Weather Satellite Update

So my last post on wxsats was with a pretty stable system running wxtoimg on my main desktop PC using Nooelec Smartee/Nooelec Sawtree LNA/filter dongle combination with a Turnstile antenna. And all was working not too badly – sometimes the extremities of passes are noisy and I’m going to try a quadrifilar antenna at some point to see whether that improves matters.

However the original plan was to run headless on a Raspberry Pi. I had to abandon this idea as the command line version of wxtoimg won’t generate the web site upload which I like. So I took a gamble and purchased a mini PC – to be precise a Beelink GTi Mini PC Windows 10 Pro,10th Gen Intel i3-1005G1 (Up to 3.40 GHz),16GB DDR4 512GB SSD WiFi 6 Triple Display 4K Mini Desktop Computer. I installed WxTrack/wxtoimg/SDR# with Zadig and started generating images from that machine. I use AnyDesk to connect to it from my main PC and run it headless (I was using teamViewer until it started to say I was using it commercially…wtf? I would buy a single-user licence for TV but it is ridiculously expensive).

All worked well but after several hours without passes (normally overnight) SDR# would stop communicating with the dongle, and the pass would be blank. I’d have to kill the SDR# process and start again. I tried all the options from turning off usb ports going to sleep and all eco power options to no avail. And then I disabled automatic Windows updates after checking the system logs and seeing Windows Defender updating definitions every night. And that seemed to fix the problem!

This is a good example of what the system can do:

NOAA-19 Southbound 73w at 07:58z 30-April 2021

So – I do recommend these mini-PCs – they are solidly built, have plenty of ports and work well. Cost 20 times a much as a Raspberry Pi mind….

Mystery on 1494 kHz

Bit of a mystery this one playing an old offshore tape from Radio London. Heard in the western coastal scouselands on 1494 kHz 14.52z 28 April 2021 on Perseus SDR and Wellbrook 1530LNP. Checked online Kiwi SDRs and only carriers seen on 1494 are on the Chester and North Wales Kiwis. Nothing in Ireland, West or East Midlands, Manchester or Yorkshire.

Lying Bastards

The buffoon is lying again and changing the goalposts. Actually let’s just call him the lying bastard. Claiming that lockdowns and not vaccines is why positive cases are dropping with drastically less hospitalisations and deaths is flying in the face of all the evidence. Lockdowns kill more people than seasonal respiratory diseases. What is going on? Is this, after all, The Great Reset?

Boris Johnson Says Lockdown Not Vaccines Responsible for Drop in Covid Cases and Deaths – Lockdown Sceptics
Has Boris lost his faith in the vaccines? That’s certainly the impression you’d get from what he has said this morning. But he is wrong to claim that infections have fallen mainly because of the lockdown.

Wxfax Reception

Been doing some wxsat reception on HF for the first time in donkeys years! receiver is the venerable and excellent NRD 535D, antenna is an Inverted V for 49 mb and software is seatty. Here’s a selection/ of images from Meteo Hamburg on 7880 kHz.

Finally here’s Northwood on 4610 kHz rediscovering the lost island of Atlantis