I am new to this project and I stumbled across it while trying to research how to receive images from orbiting weather satellites (X Band from Aqua, Aura, NOAA 20, etc). From the documentation I have found, the only antennas discussed are simple wire antennas. However, the system I have access to has a 2.4m parabolic reflector with a linear dipole focal feed mounted to a custom XY rotator.
Is it possible to connect a SDR to such a feed? If so, can someone point me to any documentation that explains how to do this?
Have you seen this article An X band primer | Jacopo's Lair ?
The main problem here is to find an SDR to process a wideband (30-60 MHz) signal (there are some rather cheap solutions that have appeared recently (pluto+, libreSDR, b220 mini, etc)) and - the most expencive and rare component - LNB (amplifier+filters+downconverter) for 7,5-8,5 Ghz frequencies. Also polarization in most cases is circular (righthand or lefthand) not linear so a proper feed must be used to avoid signal strength losses.
I 've also startied to gather hardware and knowlege about X band reception - as the day when weather satellites transmitting images on L and S band channels will be shut down like old NOAA-s is not that far.
Maybe someone will add more info here or correct me if I was wrong somehow
X band is expensive. Need to start with lower bands and gradually upgrade to the higher frequency. Hand tracking is difficult hence a rotator is needed. Eventually everything is going to move to mmWave. V/U is crowded now as well as the 1.7 GHz / 2.3 GHz bands.
Yes you can use the 2.4 m dish to a linear feed to get geostationary data in L band. It depends on the region you live. Some examples are Fengyun 2H and 2G / Elektro L2/ L3/ L4 (L5 has issues, L2 only X band), GK-2A, GOES, Meteosat etc…
Yep, X-band is really expensive and huge jump from L/S band.
Also, what kind of dish you have? I learned that size actually doesn’t really matter, what is how accurate and smooth your dish is to the frequency that you’re going to use. I have a 2.4m mesh dish that performing less than a 1.2m solid dish with very accurate parabolic shape, mainly due the inaccurate and mesh size that affect efficiency
If you’re into GHz band, geostationary satellites are much easier relative to LEO and X-band satellites.
