Pictures From Space
There's a satellite parked 22,000 miles over the equator, and it is broadcasting pictures of the entire hemisphere, all day, every day, to anyone who bothers to point a dish at it. No subscription. No login. It's just… raining imagery down, constantly, and most people have no idea.
That's GOES — the geostationary weather birds. I found it genuinely hard to believe until I did it myself, so I did it myself.
The setup
Because a geostationary satellite sits still relative to the ground, you don't need a motorized tracker chasing it across the sky. You aim once, bolt it down, and leave it. A modest dish, a filtered low-noise amplifier to claw the weak signal up out of the noise, a cheap RTL-SDR, and a decoder — I'm running SatDump on a little always-on Linux box tucked into one of my servers.
The signal comes down as a digital stream and the decoder reassembles it into full-disk images of the planet — visible, infrared, water vapor — plus a firehose of derived weather products. The first time a complete image of Earth resolved on my screen, built line by line from radio I'd received on my own roof, I just sat there grinning like an idiot.
It's not a strong signal, either. My lock sits around 6 dB of SNR — marginal, right on the edge, the kind of number that makes you fuss over cable runs and connectors. But the decoder holds sync, and the pictures keep coming.
The satellite was the easy part
Here's the thing nobody warns you about: the space segment is rock solid. It's your own plumbing that'll get you.
My decoder writes a new batch of images every few minutes, so I set up a cron job to prune anything older than a day. Simple. Except my first version pointed at a symlink, and the tool I used to find old files silently refuses to walk into a symlink unless you ask it just right — so it quietly deleted nothing, for days, while the disk crept toward full and my monitoring started screaming about memory pressure. I fixed the path. Then the next version had the opposite problem: a missing flag meant that when the folder was briefly empty, the cleanup happily deleted the output directory itself. The decoder kept writing into a folder that no longer existed.
Reclaiming that mess took a 50-gigabyte cleanup and a good hard look in the mirror. Lesson filed under permanent: the satellite 22,000 miles up is not the risky part. The eight-line shell script you wrote at midnight is.
Why bother, when weather.gov exists?
Fair question — you can pull the same imagery off the internet in two seconds. But the point isn't the picture, it's the path. Something reorganizes in your head when the image on your screen came directly from space to your antenna, with no website and no company in between. Just physics and a dish you aimed with your own hands.
That's the recurring theme around here: not consuming the thing, but understanding it well enough to receive it yourself. The internet hands you the answer. Radio makes you earn it — and you learn ten times as much on the way.
The feed runs live on this station — you can watch the imagery come down here.