SATELLITE SOFTWARE

APT ( automatic picture transmissions ) reception from weather satellites can be achieved with modest equipment you will need to know  where the satellites are to listen  to them, there a various programs out there to help you do that. a scanner receiver will give you some results, but the bandwidth on the majority of them is to narrow so if you are really interested in receiving these images you need to purchase a dedicated satellite receiver like the apt-6 satellite receiver

A very good program for decoding the signal from the various apt satellites is wxtoimg which i think has now become freeware

check the following site https://wxtoimgrestored.xyz

 

Below is a table of NOAA  APT satellites with their frequencies that are still active

 

APT SATELLITE FREQUENCIES

 

Below is a image taken from noaa 19 the second image is from noaa 18 showing bands of rain

You will want to know where the apt satellites are ( thou wxtoimg will automatically start recording when the satellite is within range ) so check the below links to the software to enable you to do this. below is a screen shot of wxtrack

 

   wxtrack

   gpredict 

  build your own sat ant 

RASPBERRY PI RE-VISTED

You will need to know where the satellites are ( or the international space station )  GPREDICT runs well on a raspberry as well as on windows

   you can download gpredict for the raspberry pi from here

   visit this page to see how to compile it

 

Now some bad news whereas the excellent wxtoimg program can be compiled on a raspberry pi,  it cannot decode a 'live' transmission as you are relying on using a soundcard dongle to get an audio input into the raspberry pi - wxtoimg wants to use a sample rate of 11.025 kHz ( 11khz ) whereas the soundcard dongle only works at 44 kHz. The  images simply will not sync (see the raspberry pi page )

 The GPREDICT program works extremely well on a raspberry pi