From the Archives: Receiving NOAA Weather Satellite Images
In 2023, while living with my dad in South Carolina, I came across the YouTube video that would eventually send me down the radio rabbit hole. That video was saveitforparts' How To Get Live Satellite Images Directly From Space. I had some inkling that there was something interesting to be pulled from the airwaves that go (literally) over our heads each day, but I was surprised to learn that I could pull live satellite images from my backyard with less than $50 in equipment. I went ahead and picked up an RTL-SDR as mentioned in the video and started tracking satellite passes using the excellent tools at n2yo.com. Soon enough, my dad was (understandably) asking some questions about what I was doing with a laptop and a pair of rabbit ears in the backyard at 12:45 AM. Questions aside, the results I got were actually pretty solid given I had no idea what I was doing:
Other images weren't quite as clean, but still very recognizable:
Ever since I picked up that first SDR, I've been involved in the radio hobby in some way or another. This has led me to getting my Technician license, experimenting with HF, learning Morse code, and engineering around the constraints of living in an apartment. Funnily enough, that first satellite decoding project was probably the easiest one of my radio projects to label as "successful." That's mostly because my recent work has been more educated screwing around and experimenting ("let's see what this big indoor dipole can pick up!") than structured projects with well-defined end goals. If your success criteria include having fun and learning stuff, you could say my track record has been pretty good so far!
I'm writing this up not only to share some cool satellite images, but also as a tribute to NOAA's Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) constellation. The last of these, NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and NOAA-19, were shut down in mid-2025. The images above were pulled off NOAA-19 and NOAA-18, respectively. These satellites were well-known in the amateur radio and amateur satellite niches for how easy they were to receive and decode, and the community shares my sadness in seeing them go. There are other weather satellites up there that we'll still be able to listen to going forward, but the POES decommissioning means that the barrier for entry into the amateur satellite hobby just got substantially higher. The new go-tos seem to be the Russian Meteor series and the American GOES series, both of which require a dish or specialized antenna to receive. That $50 I paid at the door back in 2023 looks more like $150-$200 now. I think this will have a slight chilling effect in terms of the number of new radio enthusiasts finding the hobby, which is a real shame. However, there's still plenty for determined new hams (like me!) to explore up there, so I'm still optimistic for the future.
New satellite radio project coming soon... :)