Usradioguy Blogs

Online Dish Pointer

NEW Dish Pointer for Geostationary Satellites. I created a Satellite Dish Pointer page over the weekend, added in all 539 current geostationary satellites, and added a map to find your location and then automatically calculate the Longitude, Azimuth,(true north), Azimuth (magnetic north), Elevation, and Skew angles for both 0° and 90° degree style dishes. Magnetic Declination tables […]

Read More

NOAA’s GOES-18 is now GOES West

Earth from Orbit: NOAA’s GOES-18 is now GOES West January 4, 2023 NOAA Press Release: NOAA’s operational satellite fleet has a new member. GOES-18 entered service as GOES West on Jan. 4, 2023. The milestone comes after a Mar. 1, 2022, launch and post-launch testing of the satellite’s instruments, systems, and data. GOES-18 replaces GOES-17 as GOES […]

Read More

Adios GOES-17

GOES-17, is soon to be headed off into the sunrise, that is, it will begin drifting to its new, on-orbit storage location east of its current 137.3°W to 104.7°W as GOES-18 Takes over on January 4th, 2023 On January 4th GOES-18 will step up and become the GOES-West geostationary satellite covering the Pacific and Western […]

Read More
Satellite Orbiting Earth

Himawari-8 to Himawari-9 Transition

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) will switch operations from Himawari-8 to Himawari-9 on 13 December at 05:00 UTC Himawari 9 has been in space in on-orbit storage since 2016, Happily waiting for its chance to become the primary Satellite, taking over from Himawari-8. Same tech, identical satellites, same AHI sensors, etc. Now is the time […]

Read More

Simon’s World Map

UPDATE: 11/26/2022 Simon has updated the map (1.3.5) with a few new options that I asked for, one was a lighter track for the satellites so they would show on darker maps like my geo-ring maps (below). Zoom now makes use of the whole screen in Zoom mode even if the aspect ratio was not […]

Read More

NOAA-15 AVHRR Issues

Updated 08/28/2023 Looks like NOAA 15 AVHRR scan motor is heating up again, Causing some issues with scanning and affecting the APT and HRPT Imagery: What follows below is an article from October 2022 NOAA-15 AVHRR degraded image data. Starting on October 18th, 2022, NOAA-15 suffered an issue with its AVHRR Scan Motor. This is […]

Read More
NOAA 15

NOAA 15,18,19 to transition to private On-orbit operations

NOAA Awards Parsons Team $16 Million Contract For Polar Operational Environmental Satellites Operations October 19, 2022 CENTREVILLE, Va., Oct. 19, 2022 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has selected a team led by Parsons Corporation to provide engineering services, information technology functionality, and flight operations support to assume on-orbit operations for the Polar […]

Read More

Groups that focus on Weather Sat Reception

There are quite a bit of us hobbyists out there on the planet (See the map of hobbyists here!), that focus on and share techniques, images, software, guides etc. If you’re interested in learning about or sharing what you know, here’s a list to get you started with groups! Geo-Stationary Weather Satellite Group on Facebook […]

Read More

False Color Imagery

GOES, Himawari, Meteosat, FENGYUN, Elecktro and other Satellites don’t “see” in color, they all basically “see” in various greyscale IR bands, There are two visible bands, blue and red. These two wavelengths are named relative to their location on the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. While these visible images would appear in blue and […]

Read More