Building a Frame Decoder for the GOES Weather Satellite

Yesterday we posted about Lucas Teskes (@lucasteske) success in building a demodulator for the GOES weather satellite. Before that he also showed us how to build an antenna system to receive GOES with an Airspy or RTL-SDR dongle.

Today Lucas continues with part three of his series on GOES decoding. This time he shows how he has built a frame decoder to process the output of the demodulator, and also gives us a link to his code. The decoder is written in C code. Lucas’ post explains how to sync the frame by detecting the preamble, perform convolution encoding to generate a parity and help correct any errors, and decode the frame data.

In part four Lucas will show us how to parse the frame data and extract the packets which will eventually form an image file of the earth.