RasPi WxSat: GOES Receiver Project

[Nashua Area Radio Society]

Got around to throwing together another Raspberry Pi project at the end of December. This time it was to make a GOES Geosynchronous Satellite Receiver. Phase 1 was successfully completed; this was to get the components initially integrated and system running. Phase 2 (final) is to put the hardware (minus antenna) into a weatherproof enclosure. This is the hardware:

It consists of a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi Grid Parabolic Antenna with a simple mod to the feed to get it working around 1.7GHz, GOES LNA/SAW-filter module, SDR dongle, and a Raspberry Pi 3B+.  I discovered a RasPi Zero will not work on this setup; the chipset is not compatible with the GOESTOOLS code.

Integration of the hardware, OS (Raspian Linux), and GOESTOOLS is really easy. When running you can get images like this (reduced down from its native 5424 x 5424, 14.5MB size):

I estimate there is about 5 to 7 GB of data being pulled down on a daily basis… everything from the image above updated every half hour to enhanced IR and other cool images on different channels. There is even National Weather Service raster drawings of ocean/wind currents and relayed images from GOES15 (above Hawaii/West Coast) and a Japanese GOES satellite (Himawari8). So, I got a little work to do in updating the config file to get just what I need and working on some scripts to keep offloading data from the Pi to another home computer to keep the Pi from choking on the plethora of data from filling the 32GB SD card.

Here are some videos created from images received from my GOES Groundstation. The movies were done with FFMPEG (freeware):

• 51-hour image sequence created from 101-frames over the timespan of 1900Z on 29-DEC-2018 thru 2200Z on 31-DEC-2018. Full-Color, Full-Disk:
  https://www.youtube.com/s4Ij7-STOa0

• Channel 13 (enhanced):
  https://www.youtube.com/QiXfeiNFQxY

• A storm that was monitored on Mesoscale Channel (M1) over Argentina with visual and Channel 13E shown:
  https://www.youtube.com/21xmtTni4zo
  https://www.youtube.com/KOcU4U0Z8JY

[Jamey Finchum]

Wayne,

This is very cool! I have been looking at your videos and pictures on facebook and am very impressed! You will need to give a talk during on of the tech nights on this.

Thanks for sharing.

73,

Jamey, AC1DC

[Nashua Area Radio Society]

Thanks, Jamey!

Doing a little more work on the project this weekend.  Learning more about coding (bash/python scripts on the RasPi).  Testing out an auto-start feature on power-up.  Good for power loss/return, so the station gets back up on it’s own.  I haven’t put it on the crontab yet for automatically running just yet.  Testing out the program starter script today.  Checks out OK with the system hanging in the garage last night, as I SSH’d into the Pi over WiFi.

After I add the python modules (running on RasPi NOAA) to the GOES RasPI for tweeting and emailing today, I’ll do more testing to make sure RasPi GOES texts me the reboot complete status.

Got a lot I want to do to this GOES project.  Need to work on scripts for offloading the 5-7GB of daily data to another computer on the network.

Fun stuff…  Got three RasPi’s going with others planned…

a) RasPi NOAA Receiver – OPERATING – outputs to Twitter @RasPi_WxSat
b) RasPi GOES Receiver – part time operation, until I get an enclosure for the electronics
c)  Pi-Aware – ADS-B monitor outputting to my local network, as well as feeding to FlightAware.com
d)  FoxInABox (FIAB) – DOWN for rework – monitoring FOX satellite telemetry

 

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