Building the Raspberry Pi NOAA Satellite Station
Building the Raspberry Pi NOAA Satellite Station After building the station to receive the GOES geostationary weather satellite, constructing the NOAA satellite station was a relative breeze. The NOAA series of satellites (NOAA 15, 18 and 19) are much more similar to amateur satellites than the GOES satellite – they operate in the 137 mhz band, are in low-earth orbits and transmit analog images rather than the complex error-corrected digital images of the GOES satellites. I simply followed the “ Instructables ” project design and it mostly worked the first time. The overall concept is simple – the project uses a inexpensive RTL-SDR radio and a Raspberry P i computer along with free software that you install on the Pi. There are several components to the software – first it uses the Gpredict program to set up times (cron jobs) for each satellite based on the next pass for each of the three satellites. At the scheduled time the Pi runs a script that will enable the RTL-SDR receiv