New GNU Radio Block for Decoding Meteor M2 Images
Thank you to Reiichiro Nakano for submitting news about his work on converting the Pascal based meteor_decoder software into a C++ GNU Radio block. meteor_decoder is a decoder for the Meteor M2 weather image satellite. Meteor M2 is a Russian weather satellite that transmits images down in the digital LRPT format. This provides much higher resolution images compared to the NOAA APT signals. With an RTL-SDR, appropriate satellite antenna and decoding software it is possible to receive these images.
Reiichiro works for Infostellar, which appears to be a Japanese company aiming to connect satellites to the internet via distributed and shared ground stations. It appears to be somewhat similar to the SatNOGs project. Reiichiro writes:
Just wanted to share a simple project I built for my company Infostellar, in the past week. I converted https://github.com/
artlav/meteor_decoder to C++ and placed it within a GNURadio block for direct decoding of Meteor M2 images. It's a sink that expects soft QPSK demodulated signed bytes. Once the flowgraph stops running, it parses out received packets and dumps the received Meteor images in a specified location. The block is part of our Starcoder repository and can be installed from here (https://github.com/infostellarinc/starcoder/blob/ master/gr-starcoder/lib/ meteor_decoder_sink_impl.cc ).