OARC VHF Weather Satellite Reception Tips & Tricks

Meteor-M2 LRPT capture of the Eastern Atlantic and the U.K. & Ireland - MM3IIG

This is the home of what will hopefully become a useful club resource for people wanting to do some VHF satellite reception of either NOAA APT signals or the LRPT signal from the Russian meteor satellites. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel as plenty has been written before on this subject. Instead there will be links to other places around the Internet, but also some learned wisdom and tips from OARC members. The guide is split into sections and you can always get back to the index by using the breadcrumb links up at the top.

VHF satellite work is the easiest satellite reception work to get into. If you get the bug after doing this consider moving up to L-band HRPT reception, which should doable with a modest antenna. The next step up from that is to geostationary satellites, where you'll be needing dishes, amplifiers, filters, and a whole lot of kit. There are a few places on the internet that specialise in this kind of thing.

To-do: Finish the antenna section (plus links!), maybe a bit more about radio choice, and any other suggestions that you guys want.

Mark MM3IIG

• Antenna considerations + links to projects - some links to plans, discussion on options, and some tips from members
• Hardware overview - including SDRs/radios, low-noise amps, and bandpass filters
• Software overview + tips - some of the software used to do this work is awful - here's some useful tips for various APT/LRPT applications
• General tips/data for APT and LRPT decoding - some discussion on the signals in general, a list of frequencies, and some last-minute “gotchas” to avoid
• OARC reception gallery - some shots from around the club

There’s lots of places where you can find some more information on reception, software, antennas, and all other relevant topics:

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/amateursatellites/ - Amateur Satellites subreddit, which does lots of weather satellite reception as well as amateur radio satellites.

LibreSpace: https://libre.space - Has a forum where you can ask about reception and rotors/tracking etc.

Twitter: Putting terms such as “meteor”, “LRPT” and the names of the NOAA satellites into Twitter can net you lots of new people to follow who are good sources of help, plus images of passes you can compare your captures with. A lot of the people on these places overlap, though. The community is a small but friendly one.