Receive weather satellite images at home (2026 guide: after NOAA APT)

A photo of your sky, from space, received by you

Polar-orbiting weather satellites fly about 800 km up and send down the pictures they take as they go. Anyone under the satellite can receive them; no account, no internet, no subscription. Ten minutes after the satellite rises, you can be looking at the clouds over your own city, often with the coastline sharp enough to recognise your own bay.

It is one of the most rewarding first projects in radio, because the result is something you can show anyone.

What changed in 2025: the end of NOAA APT

For decades the classic beginner project was the analogue APT signal from the American NOAA-15, NOAA-18 and NOAA-19 satellites on 137 MHz. They were well past their design lives, and in 2025 NOAA retired all three: NOAA-18 on 6 June, NOAA-19 on 13 August and NOAA-15 on 19 August. Many older tutorials still describe them; their signals are gone.

Today the beginner's target is the Russian Meteor-M series, especially Meteor-M N2-3 and N2-4. They transmit a digital signal called LRPT, also around 137 MHz, so the same antenna works. Being digital, it cannot be heard as a tone or decoded by ear, but free software turns it into sharper images than APT ever gave.

The Meteor-M LRPT signal in brief

• Frequency: 137.900 MHz or 137.100 MHz. The operators switch now and then without notice, so check recent reports before a pass.
• Signal: QPSK at 72 or 80 kilosymbols per second, about 120–150 kHz wide on the waterfall: a flat-topped hump, not a thin line.
• Pictures: three channels at about 1 km per pixel. By day they combine into a natural-looking colour image; at night the infrared channel still shows clouds by their temperature.
• Swath: about 2,800 km wide. One pass can cover the whole Korean peninsula and Japan, or the eastern United States from Maine to Florida.

Build a V-dipole in an afternoon

The simplest good antenna for 137 MHz is a V-dipole: two straight metal rods, each about 53 cm long, joined at a 120° angle and connected to the two conductors of a coax cable. Telescopic rods, aluminium tubes or even stiff wire all work.

Lay it horizontally about a metre above the ground, with the open side of the V facing north or south. Weather satellites fly pole to pole, and this lines the antenna up with their path. Mount it outdoors, clear of walls and metal roofs; a tripod in the garden or a balcony rail is fine.

A quadrifilar helix (QFH) antenna receives more evenly across the whole sky and is the usual upgrade, but the V-dipole is famous for working well for the cost of a sandwich.

Receive and decode with SatDump

SatDump is free and runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. The basic flow:

• Choose a pass with maximum elevation above about 30°. Lower passes work, but the image gets noisy at the edges.
• In SatDump, pick the Meteor M2-x LRPT pipeline at the frequency the satellite is using, with a sample rate of about 1 MSPS and gain around 30–40 dB.
• Start recording a minute before the rise time. As the satellite climbs, the hump appears on the waterfall and the constellation display tightens into four clean dots.
• Let it run until the signal fades. SatDump builds the image as it goes and, with your location and the satellite's orbit, can project it onto a map with coastlines.

Reading your first image

Bright white areas are thick, tall clouds; thin grey veils are high cirrus. Over the sea, the cleanest dark blue means clear sky. Snow on mountains also shows up white, but it stays still from one day to the next while clouds move.

In the infrared channel colours are reversed from intuition: cold is bright. The tops of thunderstorm towers, at −50 °C or colder, glow brightest of all, which is how forecasters spot the strongest storms at night.

If the image has black bars or noisy stripes, the signal dropped briefly: usually a building blocking a low part of the pass, or a nearby transmitter. If nothing decodes at all, the satellite may have switched frequency or turned its transmitter off.

Next steps: geostationary satellites

Once LRPT is working, many people move on to geostationary weather satellites, which hang over one spot and send full-disk images of the Earth around the clock. Korea's GEO-KOMPSAT-2A sends LRIT images near 1692 MHz and the American GOES satellites send HRIT near 1694 MHz. Both need a small dish (often around 1 m), a low-noise amplifier and a filter, but no tracking: you point the dish once and leave it.