I did try to receive Eutelsat W2A on the 80cm dish which was already setup for the Eumetcast service but its clearly too small could get a few transponders but not the one I needed, so I need to source a slightly larger dish 100cm – 120cm during the next month or so then I’ll be receiving data!

In the mean time you can see 3 hourly images from around the world at http://wx.magicbug.co.uk

Envisat captures volcanic eruptions in Japan

After reading about the Envi-Ham Project in The Group for Earth Observation Journal and plenty of emails about it on weather satellite newsgroups I decided to send the ESA an email and ask about joining the project myself, this turned out to be a very simple process involving filling out an agreement form and emailing it back as a PDF plus sending a paper-copy.

I did this on Monday and by the end of the day my application was accepted and I was sent further details on how to access the Envisat Images which are sent via DVB data stream from Eutelsat W2A at 10º East, my plan is due to the one degree separation between it and Eurobird 9A which Eumetcast uses I should be able to use the same dish.

I’m currently waiting for a second DVB World DVB-S USB2102 to arrive in the post then, I should be in receiving images very soon..

Info about Envi-Sat can be found at http://envisat.esa.int/earth/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=6

The collection system at the house has two parts

• Weather Satellite Images (Eumetcast Service)
• Weather Data from Wireless weather station

Since getting the Eumetcast system setup I had been running it on its own dedicated computer in this case it was a Sony Vaio laptop which I used to use for University work but it was struggling with the task  and often crashed, So a better solution was needed in the end I decided to take a jump in the dark and ordered Intel Atom 1.6GHZ Dual core, 2GB Ram and a 250gb hard drive system from Novatech for around £250.

At first I was a bit nervous the system wouldn’t cope with the large amounts of data which is sent over the eumetcast system, but after installing Windows XP Pro and the software suite required to make it all function its worked fantastically for over 2 months without being turned off bar one powercut for 5 hours.

You can see the images at http://wx.magicbug.co.uk

Overall power usage is minimal over the course of the month, and its been the most stable system I’ve used for such a purpose. Over the coming months I’d like to move it all across to Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) instead of Windows but this will need some investigation.

• Group for Earth Observation Membership
• DVB World USB Receiver
• Dish + LNB
• Satellite meter
• EUMETCast Client Software
• EUMETCast Key Unit

The EUMETCast stuff is currently being approved by their legal department once that’s sorted, they’ll phone and take payment and sent it out from Germany. The rest of the equipment will be arriving in the post hopefully this week.

I’ve been running the Sandaysoft Culumus software since October last year and have nothing but praise for the software, it allows you to do everything from downloading data from weather station base units, to Tweeting the information. One thing I’ve always thought was the themes for web pages weren’t up to much so the I spent some time this month developing my own but in a way it could be useful to others.

The idea was to use a local city/town scape background then display all the different areas of data within boxes, its also easily customisable if you want to add more menu tabs and extra content you can see a live copy of the theme at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/

The theme and all its files including PSD files are hosted on Github http://github.com/magicbug/Culumus-Weather-Theme/ your free to download, use, tinker.

With the QFH its decoding from well above the top of Iceland all the way down to Algeria, and best of all the images are mostly noise free. the antenna is only about 10 feet off the ground attached to the rose arch in the garden.

You can have a look at the images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/ their uploaded a couple of minutes after each pass automatically by the software.

What TweetWX does is searches twitter for the weather terms “Wind, Barometer, Temperature, Rain, Humidity” then shows the tweets in a timeline  this refreshes every 40 seconds with any new weather tweets available.

Each time it reads a tweet it also checks to see if we’ve stored it in our database if not it collects its profile data and stores it so its available as a list on the site for users to find all the current stations available!

The whole site took 1 day to code using the PHP framework CodeIgniter, You can check it out by visiting http://www.magicbug.co.uk/tweetwx

Afterwards it has the ability to upload the decoded image and provides an RSS feed which can be subscribed to, which is handy as you can view the image on any type of device as long as you have Internet access.

After a week and a half of decoding the results have been relativity good considering its not using a crossed or QFH style antenna, images do have noticeable noise on them but there still usable. and the software has performed without any issues.

You can find the latest images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/

You can follow by going to http://twitter.com/oxfordwx which updates on an hourly basis. Tim (G4VXE) has also added his weather station at Longworth you can find it at http://twitter.com/LongworthWx