How to Pull Images from Satellites in Orbit (NOAA 15,18,19 and METEOR M2)

From the Thought Emporium! Over the past several years, the Thought Emporium has been building antennas to receive signals from weather satellites as they pass overhead. This video chronicles their progress through this project and goes through some of the science involved in working with radio and receiving transmissions. They explore how dipoles work and how to build them, and how they built their final double cross antenna. They used an SDR (software defined radio) called a HackRF to do the work of interpreting the received signals and then decoded them with some special software. They pulled images from 4 satellites: NOAA 15, 18 and 19 as well as METEOR M2. The satellites broadcast immediately as they take the images and no images are stored, so we’re likely the only ones on earth with these images.