You may remember a couple of weeks (?) ago Captn. Slarty posted about the NOAA satellites and suggested they may be useful to help interpret weather data.

Well, today I have been messing about with the system. Using my normal Yaesu 857 transceiver, into the soundcard of my normal beat-up old laptop, using a programme called wxtoimg to capture and process the images (and control the radio which improves the results slightly by allowing for doppler shift), I came up with the image below.

The antenna is a home-made J-match designed for 144MHz while the satellites transmits on 137MHz!

I must admit, I am quite pleased, it needed no extra kit at all, except that I paid for the upgrade to wxtoimg from the freeware version. The paid-up version can control the radio so it copes better with the narrow bandwidth of a 'normal' receiver, and changes freq to allow for automatic capture.

I have no idea what the image is telling me. My location is marked with the small red cross, and it was 6/8 cloud as the sat went over. I suppose need to fiddle around with the various false colour systems to highlight cloud which I guess is what I want to see.

Off now to build a better antenna which should improve the results dramatically.

Pointless? Possibly! But it would be very very easy to install on the typical liveaboard which will already have most of the kit needed.