So with some fine weather at the beginning of the week I finally got round to installing the turnstile antenna for NOAA weather satellite reception. Took far too long as I had a very dodgy piece of coax. The antenna sits on the top of the mast holding my Cobweb antenna. Routing the cables fairly discreetly means it’s about a 30m run and I had a length of cable just perfect. However despite both inner and outer continuity both ends, and working fine when tested with a dummy load the cable had an issue when feeding the antenna. Signals were far too low and the swr curve did not look right at all. Search me why though…..

So that cable was binned and I ended up using about 3x10m lengths of RG213. Anyway……results were fine but it was interesting to note that at some positions of a pass the V2000 at 3m height had an advantage over the turnstile at 7/8m high. They are separated by around 10m and obviously have different views of the sky and the blocking objects such as trees, building etc. Overall I would say the turnstile has a slight advantage though if you can only use a low vertical co-linear then you’ll be doing just fine and not missing much.

Here’s an example of a pass using the turnstile twig.

I’ve started uploading decoded satellite images directly to a dedicated website. The pc version of wxtoimg supports this very well – automatically decoding and ftp’ing images after each pass using a supplied html template. If I could find a way for the Raspberry Pi command line version to do this we’d be quids in…Here’s the dedicated website: Weather Satellite Images