Design of a Weather Ground Station based on Software Defined Radio

Abstract

There is a widespread misconception that for building a ground station to receive satellite images, firstly an authorized license is required and secondly, huge parabolic dishes with specialized RF receivers are necessary and much more costly devices. This is however, not the case. While the space industry keeps growing, the need for low cost solutions increases. This applies also to the ground station systems. In this paper, we describe how to build a lowest cost reception ground station for meteorological satellites and how to use some necessary software to track, receive and decode the images sent every day. National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) has a group of satellites that provide weather data continuously. The data also helps humanity in disaster management since the satellite launch. The NOAA weather satellites, broadcast an Automatic Picture Transmission APT signal, containing a weather picture of any zone in the world. These signals show up at around ~137 MHz, and just when a satellite is passing overhead. Each satellite has a different frequency.