My Weather Satellite Receiving Station

I first came into contact with the concept of receiving images from polar orbiting weather satellites back in June 1992 when I read the first of three articles in a magazine called Electronics Australia. The Author, Tom Moffat clearly explained how the satellites worked and what you would need to listen to them. He also detailed a decoder box that plugged into a PC parallel port and an antenna that best fit the bill for the satellite signals. Although I didn't get around to actually receiving images from the NOAA satellites until very recently, Tom's articles were dragged out and read again.

The antenna

I have used two antennas for receiving signals from weather satellites the first was one detailed by Tom called the Lindenblad. It worked will however due to my haste in construction it didn't last the onslaught from pigeons landing on it. The elements got regularly adjusted by the pigeons and eventually fell off altogether. My second and current antenna is a Quadrifilar helicoidal antenna or QHA and the pigeons aren't to keen about landing on it.

Picture 1 - Lindenblad antenna

Picture 2 - My favourite picture to date