Capturing NOAA Satellite Imagery With RTL-SDR

NOAA Satellite Imagery

In this entry I’ll show you how to grab NOAA Satellite Imagery.  There are still 3 operational satellites.  NOAA 15, 18, and 19.  NOAA 15 started acting up last October but is still functional.  The pic just to the left is from NOAA 15.

Did you know that ANYONE with the right hardware can download telemetry from these satellites?

Not only that, it can be done pretty cheaply.   All it takes is a computer, an antenna, a USB RTL-SDR device, and some free computer software.

It isn’t that difficult either but does take some time to get it working correctly.

And for the purposes of the blog, I am doing this on a Linux (Ubuntu) laptop.  But you can do it on Windows as well.
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RTL-SDR’s are COOL.  The list of things you can do with them is almost too long to list here.  But know that it ranges from “listening to the radio” to hardcore scientific atmospheric experiments, and everything in between.  Hackers can open your car door or garage door with them and private detectives can record the radio signals from your tire pressure monitors to prove you were somewhere you shouldn’t have been.  Remember the day when they used to have to sit for hours in a car and take your picture?  No more.

I recommend to anyone that will listen that they should have an RTL-SDR in their emergency kit.  When I went through Hurricane Florence in 2018 in New Bern NC all local communications went down INCLUDING the NOAA Weather Radio Station.  How’s that for a kick in the pants?  I watched TV anchors walk off the set due to flooding in their studios.  But the police and firemen and Linemen were still out there and I was listening as they restored power to my area.  Also having an RTL-SDR during a violent Hurricane KEPT ME ENTERTAINED and kept my mind off of things.  AM radio was my best way to stay informed but be warned that some of the SDR’s below need up converters (more hardware) to listen to AM radio or some geek skills to enable the device to listen to frequencies below 24 MHz.

Anyway…….how do you select what SDR you buy?  There are lots of them out there and I’ll hit some quick pros and cons on selecting them. If you go to Amazon and search, this is usually the first one that pops up.   The RTL-SDR Blog Version 3.

It may be one of the better general purpose receivers and is relatively low cost.  Let’s do some pros and cons.  There pros and cons are for FIRST TIME USERS AND BUYERS.  Not for old pros.

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I live in Hurricane country and it is hurricane season.  Everyone tells you to have a radio in your storm preparation kit, but they don’t specify WHAT radio but sometimes they will say “Weather” radio.  A decent weather radio will set you back $30 or so.  But then that doesn’t get you the local news.  So an AM/FM/Weather radio that is decent will set you back even more.  There are cheaper ones than I just linked, but not cheaper by much.

During Hurricane Florence in New Bern, NC the local TV stations bugged out and the NOAA weather station was damaged and stopped transmitting.

Power was out and there was widespread flooding.  And an almost across the board loss of LOCAL communications.  At this point you are left with the Ham Radio folks.  Also most people probably aren’t aware the AM radio signals can be heard for HUNDREDS OF MILES at night.  So if your town loses all communications, the next one over probably didn’t.  Or that big city 200 miles away inland didn’t.

Below is the AM band at 1AM from my location in Eastern NC.  660 AM is WFAN in New York and it is coming in crystal clear.  It is routine to listen to Louisville, Clevland, New York, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, Canada, etc.  You can see how many signals there are of good strength.

AM Radio at 1 AM Eastern North Carolina

Anyway, even supposing you have a multi-band radio that doesn’t help you when most everything goes off the air.  Where are you going to get your information?
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Using an SDR device over your local network is pretty handy.  If you are like me your antenna connection for your SDR is in one place.   If you want to play “radio” you have to do it in that one place formerly known as “The Ham Shack”.  No more.  The Ham Shack can be anywhere in the house now.

Using an SDR over the network is nothing new but the various methods have pros and cons.   Essentially I want to be able to roll through 0 KHz to 1800 MHz from anywhere in the house.   In my previous blog I used an Airspy HF+ Discovery to stream to a Mac computer.  That worked perfectly but the Airspy HF+ does HF (plus a little more).   It doesn’t go 0-1800.

But my SDRPlay devices (RSPdx, RSP1a, and RSPDuo) do.  SDRPlay has some network Server software called RSP_TCP and let’s just call a duck, a duck shall we?  It’s crap.   It has limitations and it seems to be an abandoned project.  Go to their Github page and nothing has been done to the code for a couple of years.

But the folks at SDRPlay came up with an awesome solution to remote control a couple of years ago (which is probably why they bailed on the RSP_TCP project).

It is called VirtualHere.  I’ll try to make the explanation of that it is as simple as possible.
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It’s been a hot minute since I played with my RTL-SDR’s.  I have an Airspy Discovery HF+ which is an amazing piece of hardware, however it plays best with Windows software, specifically SDRSharp (SDR#).

The trouble is I spend most of my life on a Mac computer.   On the same download page I linked above for SDRSharp is program called SpyServer.  You can set up your Airspy HF+ Discovery to serve up radio over your network.

The trouble with that is the best software client to do that is SDR# which is Windows only.  So in order to make it work on Mac here is what we will do.
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