Try building a quadrifilar helix antenna. Best yet I have found for NOAA. N7LRY has the best plans for one. Where your at I would think you would be pleased with the performance.
Good video for ppl who want to try this out. I did it a few times and it is fun; now though I click on the NOAA website for HD images.
I have found that a discone antenna is nearly ideal for receiving orbital satellites. It's also very useful for many other operations because of it's very wide bandwidth.
KB7TBT- Thanks agn for the video.. If you let the recording continue, or at least continue to receive near LOS (loss of sig) @ the horizon, you'll often find that you can receive these NOAA sats as well as the ISS ,a few degrees below your local horizon. The decoded apt image will suffer greatly due to poor snr.. but you can still dig out the audio in the noise. There are a few sat antennas that are easy and inexpensive to build if you require better snr and 'no null' decoding.. Or, just for general Oscar sat use. For example the "T-R" (Turnstile-Reflector) antenna.. I built this one from the old 1st ed. ARRL "Sat Experimenters Handbook".. This antenna is two crossed 145 MHz dipoles, fed out of phase with an 8inch piece of 75 ohm coax cable. The dipoles are spaced about 3 inches apart.. These are placed about 19 inches above a wooden 'picture frame'.. In the frame is a 19 in square piece of 'chicken wire' from the hardware store. The chicken wire acts as a reflector and adds additional gain.. The dipoles are fed with a single piece of rg8 mini etc... cheap and very low level nulls, regardless of the polar orbital pass and inclination.. 73, n6spp-cm98
Very basic starter setup but works great, you would get much cleaner signals if you tracked your satalite signal instead of manually changing the frequency There are lots of automatated programmes like WXtoImg used in tamdem with Orbitron will track the signal and decode the colour image as you recieve the transmission with no need to record audio files and process them after. I use a SDRPlay rspdx with the programme HDSDR to recieve the signal, and Orbitron to track and control HDSDR so you dont need to manually change the frequency, and via a virtual audio cable stream the signal audio to WXtoImg to decode and process the satalite image live. i sometimes use my Diamond X510 colinear and also use a home made QFH antenna that works great for NOAA and the Russion M2 satalite & ISS Above is a few images using my QFH , 1st from ISS second is NOAA19 3rd is NOAA18 and my homebuild QFH. As you can see i am in England and the cross on the NOAA images is my QTH with Europe at the bottom, my home qth has lots of buildings around and i am only 57mtrs above sea level but still get great reception using my QFH ground mouted as in the image. I do have the build plans for the QFH so feel free to email me if you would like a copy. De M7ICK
Great info, tnx. I've used a roof mounted discone for occasional reception of these satellites in the past. You've jump-started my interest. WXTOIMG and Orbitron - have used those in the past. Thanks again.
