Don’t just talk about the weather, make your own satellite images

I’ve written previously of my near-lifelong fascination for meteorology – or plain weather, if you will – and radio signals, ranging from a few hundreds of kilohertz up into the gigahertz range.

In recent years I combined those two interests by setting up my own simplified form of a ground station to receive and process radio signals and produce my own weather satellite images. At one point I had two such stations running, one to capture images from satellites passing over to the west, the other to the east of my location here in the Fraser Valley just outside of Vancouver.

Some aficionados of home weather satellite stations have scoffed at my bare-bones setups: old computers, a cheap software-defined radio, and surplus TV antennas. Getting it all working proved to be difficult, time-consuming, and at times frustrating. But none of that stopped me. As long as I was learning, I kept plugging away. 

My first success came with a station costing all of $7, so low because various bits of gear had been given to me. I needed only an adapter for an antenna connection.

More recently, because of work being done around my house, I had to temporarily take down two of my antennas that are devoted to weather satellite signals. I decided then to try to simplify the whole process, and instead of using a typical Windows-based computer system, I switched to a Raspberry Pi-based system.

For those not familiar with the Pi computers, they are very small machines, about two-thirds the size of a paperback book (some versions are as small as a credit card). These machines have changed hobbyist electronics and data processing across the world, not so much because of their size but because of their cost, well under a hundred dollars. For some versions, a Pi computer can cost under $20.

While the Raspberry Pi lineup is intended for hobbyists, and as such that can entail a lot of “playing around” to get things running, much of the work needed to get weather satellite signals into, and ultimately processed by, a Raspberry Pi is well established. As such, this means the entire suite of software needed to produce weather satellite images from a Pi can be packaged.

I turned to a radio amateur friend in Ontario. He had just gone through the procedure and was now making an “image,” a single file to download, available for those who wanted to try their hand at weather satellite data processing with a Raspberry Pi.

I won’t deny that there are a few techie hurdles in moving to the Pi platform from say a Windows-based solution, but they can be overcome in minutes with a little guidance. Those steps essentially involve turning the download file into a form that the Pi can read. Without going into detail here, suffice it to say that this step can be accomplished quite easily. The file has to be written to a microSD card, the card is popped into the Pi, and the microcomputer is turned on.

At this stage the additional hardware comes into play. That means a software-defined radio (SDR), a thumb-sized USB device costing a few tens of dollars at most, an antenna, and some cable. For an antenna I used an old set of TV rabbit ears. This antenna is really old, with a cast iron base. I found it through Facebook Marketplace. One arm was broken; I reattached it with some foil and some MacGyver-type work. I simply placed the antenna on the balcony ledge of my sundeck and aimed it north–south. I attached the antenna to the SDR with a length of coaxial cable, not unlike the sort used to connect TVs to a cable service provider.

All that was left was a little tweaking to make the software in the Pi aware of my home Wi-Fi network, and my location. Although the Pi is a full computer that can be attached to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, in practice it is easier to connect to it from – go figure – a Windows or Mac computer system. I use a utility called VNC to connect to my Raspberry Pi computers if the need arises.

In addition to their low cost, the Raspberry Pi units are extremely stable and reliable. I have one running a flight tracker utility; it has been running for more than 600 days with no intervention, other than for two program updates that took all of 30 seconds. That Pi feeds data directly to my desktop computers, so it has no need of a keyboard or monitor.

Similarly for the weather satellite Raspberry Pi. Not only does it feed images to my desktop computers, but it also feeds those same images to the messaging and digital distribution platform Discord. The upshot is that I now have immediate access to the home-generated weather satellite images, no matter where I am, through either the Discord web site or through the Discord app on a mobile device.

Want to experiment with a Raspberry Pi for yourself? Look for a used 3B version. Anything earlier lacked Wi-Fi support. Want to experiment with SDR? Check out starter units from either Nooelec or RTL-SDR Blog. 

Follow me on X (@PeterVogel) or on Bluesky (petervogel.bsky.social).

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