Receiving Weather Data from LEO Meteorological Satellites

ISSC's first-ever biweekly Highlights winner: MiyabiLover, with a homemade antenna that taps into weather-satellite transmissions using an RTL-SDR dongle and open-source tools, turning raw radio signals into images of Earth's atmosphere.

“The antenna is built out of two aluminium rods cut to precisely 53.4cm and angled 120° from each other, both fixed to a solid object to keep them in place. The two rods are soldered to a coaxial cable, wired to an RTL-SDR dongle connected to a computer running decoding software.”

MiyabiLover

MiyabiLover started out using SDR++ to record the signal and WXtoIMG to process it into usable images, and has since switched to SatDump, which handles both steps in one, more advanced tool.