Geostationnary Weather Satellite reception :

 

Below you will find how i receive Meteosat7 24/h day .I suppose WXsat will work fine,but i use the "PROSAT" softare,by Timestep.(comercialized by: timestep PObox 2001 Newmarket CB8 8XB in England and SPECTRUM international concord-Mass. in the USA. I have no comercial relations with them, they just where the cheaper i found ,and the USA team was nice and helpfull.)

The hardware is a decoder card to insert in a PCI slot of your PC, with two swichable audio inputs from geostationary or polar satelites.

The software let you program the images to be recorded, they will then be sequenced to make an animation .If you choose the diffusion times of the same sector (Meteosat divide Earth in 9 sectors),you will have a nice tool for Weather predictions.

Click for transmitions schedule for Meteosat7 (Europe), .PDF or .txt (15kb /ea)(sorry, no Goes info for now).

The converter is a kit from Radek Václávik,OK2XDX .He has very nice info on his page for WXsat and converter.

Now, the practical part : how i did it.Please note that i live in the middle of the North atlantic Ocean,so signals may be weaker than for your specific situation.

 

NEW: Attention : as far as i now, Meteosat uses linear polarization.You MUST use the same polarization than the satellite´s ,or you will notice a loss as great as 30 db .

Exact polarization will depend of your location .In my case (39ºN 31ºW), if you are looking to the dish, the probe is at 17h00 aprox.(either 11:00 or 17:00 will work, of course) .Just to start , simple vertical polarization will probably be the best.

 

Click on the pictures for a highter definition images.(75kb/ea)

 

 


 

 


 

This feed is suitable for a dish with an FD ratio of 0,40 +/- . Parabolic dishes with a highter F/D ratio are easier to iluminate, but will pick-up more noise.

to calculate the F/D (Focal/Diameter), just divide the focal distance "F" as above, and divide it by the diameter of your dish.don ´t forget to use same units...

Old TVRO dishes have a low F/D, usually about 0.3 - 0.35 , and you will have to construct a good feed to iluminate it properly.Click here for construction information of such feeds.


 

 

 

 

 

 

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