Power Suppy Refactoring

In this previous post I had the chance to present and tear down my old custom-made power supply. It worked flawlessly for about 10 years. I decided to buy a new linear lab power supply because I needed something better with more features such as constant current operation and digital display of both voltage and current.

NOAA APT Satellite - Night time weather pictures!

My first and accidental attempt at receiving images from a weather satellite was surprisingly very succesful. However as I only started capturing the RF signal late in the satellite pass, it was only possible to retrieve a small portion of the transmitted image.

Receiving weather satellite images with cheap hardware

Before the Internet, anyone willing to independently obtain satellite imagery from the source would need to buy expensive equipment capable of decoding the analog slow scan video images transmitted by weather satellites  such as the NOAA APT ones. Today there are four of these NOAA satellites still operational, the NOAA-18, 17, 15 and 19. All of these are sun-synchronous satellites, which means these orbit the earth at around 800 Km of altitude and cross every latitude at approximately the same mean local solar time for each pass. This kind of orbit is useful because of the consistent illumination (by the sun) of the target upon each pass.