| If you want to live vicariously through others, various people publish live images of captures over their locations on https://wxtoimgrestored.xyz/gallery/ In particular, being on the west coast I'm fond of watching http://wzdave.com/apt/index.html Also, you don't need a USB SDR per se; the Baofengs will work fine as its just an FM audio signal. The video shows this, but for reference, the three satellites transmitting APT pictures: https://www.heavens-above.com/SatInfo.aspx?satid=25338&lat=0... https://www.heavens-above.com/SatInfo.aspx?satid=28654&lat=0... https://www.heavens-above.com/SatInfo.aspx?satid=33591&lat=0... As others have mentioned, you don't need a fancy antenna; even a car magnetic mount 2-meter ham radio antenna will work to an extent; the problem and fun part about this is it's wonderfully analong ... any noise in the signal shows up at snow in the picture, and if your antenna isn't circularly polarized, the strength will fade in and out as the satellite moves over the horizon. Still, it works well enough to try out. In fact, even the rubber duck on the Baofeng will kind of work if its a high elevation pass (70-90 degress) as the satellite is closer and has less atmospheric attenuation. A trick I've done in the past is just to record the output of the Baofeng on your phone's voice memo app and play it back later when you're back inside. Finally, it's worth noting that APT (the tech in this video) is somewhat deprecated, but if you have an SDR already, for somewhat more effort you can receive the digital equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-rate_picture_transmission Edit: The frequencies
NOAA 15 137.62MHz
NOAA 18 137.9125MHz
NOAA 19 137.10MHz Also, if you're using a Baofeng, set it to wideband FM in the menu. The APT signal has fairly wide FM modulation compared to most terrestrial voice FM, and even wideband mode won't be enough. It'll still work in any case, but has the effect that the contrast of the picture is somewhat clipped the narrower your receive bandwidth is. |