Demuxing Frames and Generating Images from the GOES Weather Satellite

In his latest two posts Lucas Teske continues with his series about receiving and downloading weather satellite images from the GOES satellites. In past posts he’s show us how to receive the signal with a satellite dish and Airspy or RTL-SDR (part 1), how to demodulate the signal (part 2), and how to extract frames from the demodulated signal (part 3). Lucas has recently completed his series with parts 4 and 5 having just been uploaded.

In part 4 Lucas shows how to parse the frames and get the packets which will ultimately be used to generate the weather image files. His post explains how to de-randomize the frame data which is initially randomized to improve performance, how to add Reed Solomon error correction, how to demux the virtual channels and the packets and finally how to save the raw packet.

The packet structure
The packet structure

In part 5 Lucas shows us how to finally generate weather satellite images from the GOES satellites. He notes that there is a problem with the LritRice compression method used by NOAA, because the library is currently broken on Linux. So he made a workaround which involved making a Windows application that runs through Wine for decompressing the data. Once the files are decompressed he uses the xrit2pic program which can open the generated .lrit files and convert them into images.

In the future Lucas mentions that he will write a user guide to his LRIT decoder, and make the whole decoding process more user friendly for people who do not care so much about the actual decoding process. Below are some images that Lucas was able to receive with his system.

GOES Full Disk Image of the Earth
GOES Full Disk Image of the Earth
Weatherfax (WEFAX) Image
Weatherfax (WEFAX) Image

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