Search results for: GOES

AI Cloud Detection for GOES Weather Satellite Images on a Raspberry Pi

Over on his blog account at Hackser.io Justin Lutz has uploaded an article describing how he uses AI object detection to automatically detect clouds on weather satellite images that he's downloaded from GOES satellites via an RTL-SDR.

Lutz's blog post first describes and shows his RTL-SDR GOES reception setup. Then, it explains how he used Edge Impulse on his Raspberry Pi 4 to create an AI model that automatically detects the clouds in the image.

The process begins by importing 100 images into Edge Impulse, manually labelling the clouds in each image, training the model, and testing it. The result was an average detection accuracy of 90%.

GOES-19 Completes Transition to GOES-EAST Replacing GOES-16

NOAA GOES satellites are a popular way to receive beautiful full-disk weather images of the Earth using an RTL-SDR, antenna hardware such as the Discovery Dish, and software such as SatDump. The GOES-EAST satellite covers North and South America and was provided by GOES-16 until April 7th.

Over the past few months, NOAA has been moving the GOES-16 satellite into a storage orbit and the newer GOES-19 satellite, which was launched in June 2024, into the GOES-EAST position. Recently, on 7 April 2025, this transition was completed, and the GOES-16 was turned off, and the GOES-19 signal was activated.

For SatDump users, no configuration changes should be necessary to receive signals from GOES-19. However, Sanchez users will need to update their configuration file.

If you're interested, Carl Reinmann, owner of the usradioguy.com website, provides more detailed information about the transition and activation of GOES-19.

GOES-19 Received by Carl Reinmann
GOES-19 Received by Carl Reinmann

GOES-U Satellite Launched and on the way to Geostationary Orbit

On June 25 the NOAA GOES-U weather satellite was successfully launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy rocket. Once it reaches geostationary orbit, this will be a new weather satellite that RTL-SDR hobbyists can receive with an RTL-SDR dongle, satellite dish, and LNA.

From launch, it will take about two weeks for GOES-U to reach geostationary orbit and once it gets there it will be renamed to GOES-19. It is due to be positioned where GOES-16 currently is, and GOES-16 will become the redundant backup satellite. This positioning will make the satellite visible to those in North and South America.

GOES-16 is where GOES-19 will be positioned.
GOES-16 is where GOES-19 will be positioned.

We are anxiously looking forward to the first images from GOES-19 received by hobbyists, but once positioned it will probably take several weeks to be tested and calibrated before hobbyists can receive any signals on L-band. 

Over on X, @WeatherWorks posted a short video showing that the launch plume was visible from GOES-16.

The @CIRA_CSU account has also posted a video from GOES-18 which shows the launch in the water vapor bands

Finally, @SpaceX has also posted a video showing the deployment of the satellite, with an impressive shot showing how far away it is from the Earth.

Goestools Now Ported to Run on Windows

Thank you to Carl Reinemann (aka USRadioGuy) for letting us know through his blog post that goestools has recently been ported to Windows. Goestools is a software package that is used to receive and decode images from GOES weather satellites. In the past it was only available for Linux systems, however recently thanks to the work of Jamie Vital, goestools has now been ported and can run on Windows. Carl Reinemann has confirmed that the software runs perfectly on Windows. Our GOES tutorial should also be easily modified to work with the Windows port.

The Windows port can be downloaded from goestools-win on GitHub. If you are interested, Jamie Vital is also the author of Vitality GOES, which is a program that can display the received weather images in a nice GUI.

Alternatively we note that another cross platform GOES decoder is SatDump which is currently the most popular choice for GOES.

Goestools on Windows

Vitality GOES: A Web Interface for Displaying Weather Images from SatDump and/or goestools

Thank you to Carl Reinemann (aka usradioguy) for submitting his article about Vitality GOES. Vitality GOES is an open source tool that displays the weather satellite images received by SatDump and/or goestools in a user friendly web interface that is accessible over a network connection.

SatDump and goestools are decoders that can be used to decode images from GOES and other satellites, when combined with a PC or single board computer, satellite antenna and RTL-SDR or similar SDR dongle. What they lack however is an easy way to display the received images, as the images are simply dumped to folders. If you're interested in getting started with GOES reception, we have a tutorial here.

Carl's article explains the purpose of Vitality GOES in detail and shows a few example screenshots. He notes how it can be used to display full disk images, composite together Meteor M2 images, present EMWIN data such as forecasts and warnings, and more.

Carl also notes that Vitality GOES was recently updated to V1.2 with the main update being added support for SatDump. SatDump can decode dozens of different weather satellites, not only GOES, so this opens up a wide range of possibilities.

Vitality GOES - Feature Overview

Vitality GOES: Example screenshots from Carl Reinemann (usaradioguy)

Layering Geo-Spatial Fire Data onto GOES Satellite Imagery

Thank you to Carl Reinemann (aka usradioguy) for writing in and sharing with us how he has developed a script to layer FIRMS data (Fire Information for Resource Management System US / Canada) onto GOES satellite images (usradioguy blog post) that can be received with an RTL-SDR. We have a tutorial on GOES reception here.

The script is a Windows batch file that downloads FIRMS data from the internet every 12 hours, then converts that data into a format that can be processed by goestools. Once converted the resulting JSON file is uploaded to the Raspberry Pi running goestools. A custom goestool process is then used to layer the data onto the received images.

The result is accurate red polygons on the satellite image in areas where fires have been recorded. With this data visualized it is easy to see where smoke seen on the satellite images is coming from. For example, the image below shows the location of wildfires in the Western USA and the resulting smoke trailing across the continent.

Carl has also tested the fire data layer with GK-2A and Himawari-8 and notes that it works well with images from those satellites as well. 

Fires data in Western USA layered on top of received GOES satellite images.

Building a GOES-16 Antenna out of Trash, Cardboard and Foil Tape

Over on his YouTube channel saveitforparts has uploaded a video showing how he was able to modify and old DirectTV satellite dish found in the dumpster with cardboard and foil in order to receive images from the GOES-16 geostationary weather satellite.

I wanted to download images from the GOES-16 weather satellite, but didn't have a big enough satellite dish. So I made one out of an old TV dish, cardboard, and aluminum tape! Amazingly this actually works, and I was able to pull live pictures of the earth off the satellite in geostationary orbit! The cardboard won't last long-term, so I'm looking for an antique C-band dish that I can set up as a more permanent solution. However, for a cheap and expedient ground station, this worked pretty well!

Satellite Ground Station With Trash, Cardboard, and Foil Tape!

Information about Receiving the GOES-13 Weather Satellite (Europe Coverage with 1.8m Dish)

For some time now many weather satellite enthusiasts have enjoyed the ability to relatively easily receive live high resolution images directly from the GOES-16, GOES-17 and GK-2A geostationary satellites (tutorial here). However, while much of the world can see at least one of these satellites, European's have been left out.

What may be of some interest to Europeans is that the older GOES-13 (aka EWS-G1) satellite was repositioned in February 2020, and it can now be received in Europe (as well as Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Russia and West Australia) until at least 2024 when it will be replaced.

The important catch however is that GOES-13 is not broadcasting the same easy to receive LRIT/HRIT signals that the other satellites use. The signal is still in the L-Band at 1685.7 MHz, however it is called "GVAR" and it is much weaker and uses 5 MHz of bandwidth. For GOES 16/17 and GK-2A a 1m WiFi grid dish, LNA and RTL-SDR was sufficient, but for GOES-13 you'll need a much larger 1.8m dish, and a wider band SDR like an Airspy. The big dish requirement significantly increases the reception challenge.

We also note that the decoder is being developed by @aang254 and u/Xerbot and it is not yet publicly released. However, they do intend to release it soon. Update:

Over on his blog Carl Reinemann has been collecting some useful information about GOES-13 reception. Over on Reddit u/derekcz has also created a post with some useful information. We've also been talking to @ZSztanga in Poland who has been testing this satellite out, he wrote:

My hardware is: 180cm prime focus dish, with a custom cantenna (120mm diameter). I'm using the SAWBIRD GOES LNA. I will be switching to the + version, because the setup is still lacking a few db SNR. The SDR is the one I use for HRPT: the airspy mini

I found that the USB connection on the airspy generates a lot of noise, so I removed the USB cable, by moving the airspy to the laptop. I use 2m of CNT-400 coax and it works much better now. I get about 2 db SNR more. Thought you might find it interesting.

@ZSztanga's GOES-13 Reception Setup, with 1.8m dish.

We note that there is some interesting differences with GOES-13 images. Since the image is less processed, it is higher resolution (a full resolution image can be found on this Reddit post), as well as not cropped, meaning that the Earth's atmosphere is visible. Please also follow @ZSztang on Twitter for more images.