Noaaport Weather Downlink

Sorry for the long delay since the last post on the way home from Hamvention, but family matters kept me quite busy through the summer months. In my few moments of spare time I finally realized a dream of installing a dedicated C-band antenna for receiving the Noaaport weather data stream via satellite.

First a little background on this project. I started this project about 18 months ago when I picked up a Novra S-75 receiver and hooked it up to my 12 foot Dish antenna on the roof of the house. On the technical side things worked well for the most part, though I still don't have a complete handle on Linux! However for something that needs to be running 24/7 through all types of weather the roof isn't the best place for a stable receive antenna. Also, it limits my use of that antenna for TV satellite reception. So I finally decided to try and squeeze a 10 foot C-band antenna on the ground. I started digging the hole back in the late spring with dish arriving in late June. The Sami dish went together fairly easily so I though the hard part was over. Wrong!!!! Finding the satellite (AMC-4) became quite a chore, and not as easy as it should have been. Considering I have played and tweaked C-band dishes for 20 years I thought this would be easy. I managed to find the bird to the right and left of AMC-4 but hardly any signal on the bird I needed. Well turns out yours truly made a very slight miscaculation in the location of this dish and AMC-4 was located right behind a branch at the top of a tree. Can you say chainsaw? Finally a good excuse to get rid of the monster in the backyard! Once the tree came down it hardly took 5 minutes to lock down the dish on the satellite and get data flowing.

More to come...