I’ve had a side track for a couple days… I did some work on the solar tracker project and got stuck waiting for parts, and so took a look at YouTube and since I am also into Ham Radio, YouTube suggested a video on how to receive photos from weather satellites.
Ok wow. I already had all the components I needed… A Raspberry PI, an SDR USB dongle (software defined radio), an antenna.
Basically with the right software installed, and some internet access, you can tune the SDR to a NOAA satellites downlink frequency, wait for it to fly overhead, and record the audio received. From there you can give that audio file to a program that decodes the tones in the audio into a photograph.
There’s also software that automates the process so all you have to do is configure things and sit back while your Raspberry PI collects images from satellites as they fly overhead.
I’m not giving details on how to do this.. there’s so many ways to accomplish the task, and fortunately many websites and videos explaining how to do things.
Here is a link to the video that got me started.
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