Meteorological Picture Reception System using
Software Defined Radio (SDR)
César Velasco, Christian Tipantuña
Departamento de Electrónica, Telecomunicaciones y Redes de Información, Escuela Politécnica Nacional (EPN),
Ladrón de Guevara, E11-253 Quito, Ecuador.
{cesar.velasco,christian.tipantuna}@epn.edu.ec
Abstract—In this paper is shown the development of a low cost
prototype that allows the visualization of meteorological images
though the acquisition and the processing of a signal in Auto-
matic Picture Transmission (APT) format, which is transmitted by
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) polar
orbit satellites. The deployment of the system is based on Software
Defined Radio (SDR) technology, and for signal processing has
been used the GNU Radio toolkit. The whole system is built with
open-source hardware and software.
Index Terms—APT, GNU Radio, NOAA, Raspberry Pi, RTL-
SDR, SDR.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Currently, there exist a climate change around the world,
this effect is reflected in the intensification of natural
phenomena, such as: hurricanes, fires due to droughts, floods
due to heavy rains, among others. For this reason, using
technological resources to gather information about natural
phenomena is extremely important and useful, when it is
needed to make decisions that will reduce the impact of these
phenomena on the population.
One of the limitations to the development and adaptability
of technology to particular situations and regions is the use
of proprietary type of hardware and software. Hence, in
recent years a trend that is growing is the use of open-source
hardware and software [1], this mainly due to the adaptability
that this kind of technology provides, at the moment of
implementing different devices, applications and services.
Another important aspect in the development of
technological applications that is currently addressed
both theoretically and experimentally is the Software Defined
Radio (SDR) technology; which has as its main characteristic
to obtain fully reconfigurable communication systems. The
SDR technology, together with open-source hardware and
software, allows to built very flexible communication systems
that can be developed and used in many applications.
For the study, monitoring and analysis of climate
phenomena, one of the oldest and most traditional atmospheric
space programs in the world is the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which manages several
meteorological satellites. The satellites from which the
978-1-5386-3894-1/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
meteorological images are obtained in the current paper are
known as NOAA-n, where n is a number assigned to the
satellite when it is in orbit. Currently, there are 3 operational
orbiting satellites, which are: NOAA-15, NOAA-18 and
NOAA-19; each of these satellites continuously transmits
data in high resolution format High Resolution Picture
Transmission (HRPT) and in low resolution format Automatic
Picture Transmission (APT).
The current paper shows the development of a system for
the reception of meteorological images from the polar orbiting
NOAA satellites, which are currently operational. The signal
that is obtained from the satellites is obtained in format APT,
whose frequency of transmission is whithin the range of 137
and 138 MHz. Once the signal is received, it is stored and is
processed in a Raspberry Pi platform. The signal processing is
performed using the GNU Radio toolkit, specifically is used its
graphycal interface called Gnu Radio Companion and the tool
WXtoImg. In addition, to facilitate the visualization and man-
agement of the images, a web server has been implemented,
which allows the visualization of the meteorological images
obtained from each of the 3 NOAA satellites and works in an
Local Area Network (LAN) environment.
II. S OFTWARE D EFINED R ADIO
SDR technology is a flexible and versatile architecture in
which the functions related with communications hardware
can be abstracted as a software component, wich can be
configured or programmed as it is needed. This concept
was adopted by Joseph Mitola in the early 1990’s [2]. In
its beginnings this technology was linked to the military
applications, but with the passing of the years and the
technological advances, projects were created aimed at
communication networks and amateur radio applications. A
project that was developed to work with SDR plataforms is
the well known GNU Radio toolkit, which has many libraries
for signal processing.
The SDR technology does not have an official standard,
but there is a working group called the Wireless Innovation
Forum [3], which promotes the development of standards,
specifications and the deployment of SDR technology. To
establish a formal definition of SDR technology and taking
into account its associated benefits, the Wireless Innovation
Forum in collaboration with the Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers (IEEE) P1900.1 group have established
the following definition: “Radio in which part or all functions
of the physical layer are defined by software”.
III. AUTOMATIC P ICTURE T RANSMISSION (APT)
The low-resolution analog mode transmission of NOAA
satellites is the APT format. The pictures that are obtained
in this format depict luminance, also known as grayscale;
consequently, the dark tones depict the warm regions and the
bright tones depict cold regions, as shown in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Picture obtained from NOAA-18 [4].
The pictures are made up of two channels, A and B.
The channel A during the day makes the use of the band
of the visible spectrum, and at night it uses the medium
infrared band, meanwhile the channel B uses the infrared
band constantly during the day and at night.
For transmission of pictures in APT format, the data stream
is modulated in amplitude (AM) at a frequency of 2400 Hz,
resulting in a signal that varies in amplitude depending on
the information coming from the AVHRR/3 sensor, which
is capable of measuring radiation in different areas of the
electromagnetic spectrum. Then the signal is modulated in
frequency (FM) between 137 and 138 MHz with a maximum
peak deviation of 17 KHz, and finally the signal is amplified
and transmitted to earth [5]. The frame of a picture in APT
format can be seen in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Format of the frame of an APT picture [6].
A complete line of video of this frame has a duration
of 0.5 seconds; so too, a complete video line of an APT
frame is 2080 pixels long, of which 1818 are used to form
the image, the rest are used for telemetry and synchronization.
In Fig. 2 it can also be seen that the picture in APT format
is formed by the following parameters: a sync pulse, a space
and minute marker, the image is scanned by the AVHRR/3
sensor and the telemetry frame; each of these parameters are
specific to each of the two channels. Sync pulse is a sequence
of seven pulses whose frequency is 1040 Hz for channel A
and 832 Hz for channel B; space and minute marker, for the
case of the channel A, the space refers to a black line that
will be repeated for a period of 60 seconds and the minute
marker is a horizontal white line, while for channel B, the
space refers to a white line that will be repeated for a period
of 60 seconds and the minute marker is a horizontal black
line; the scanned image by the sensor AVHRR/3 is the image
itself for the two channels A and B; finally, the telemetry
frame for both channel A and channel B is formed by levels
of modulation and amplitude that form the gray scale, as well
as the calibration of the temperature of the pictures.
IV. H ARDWARE USED FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE
PROTOTYPE
The hardware used in the prototype system consists of a
Raspberry Pi platform and a RTL-SDR module. In addition,
a Quadrifilar Helical Antenna (QHA) is used, in order to
capture the signal in APT format, signal transmitted by the
NOAA satellites.
A. RTL-SDR module
The RTL-SDR module that is used for the development of
the prototype is shown in Fig. 3. This module consists mainly
of two chips, the RTL2832U demodulator and the R820T
tuner.
Fig. 3. RTL-SDR module.
The main features of the RTL-SDR module are shown below
[7]:
• The input for the antenna is of female SMA type, with
an impedance of 50 ohms and with a loss less than 0.2
dB.
 • The maximum sample rate is 3.2 MHz, although it is
recommended that it be 2.8 MHz.
• It has an 8-bit resolution.
• It has a USB 2.0 interface.
The RTL-SDR module has two functions, the first which
is to generate two continuous signals in baseband, one in
phase and one in quadrature, for the signal in APT format
that is captured by the Quadrifilar Helical Antenna, this is
performed by the R820T tuner. The second function is to
perform an analog-digital conversion of the signals in phase
and quadrature, this is done by the demodulator RTL2832U.
B. Raspberry Pi platform
The Raspberry Pi is an ARM (Advanced RISC Machine)
32-bit microcomputer that can work with applications where
low power is the priority. The model used in the development
of the prototype is the Raspberry Pi 2 model B, whose
characteristics can be found in [8].
The Raspberry Pi platform is used for the processing and
storage of signals delivered by the RTL-SDR module. Also, it
is used as a web server for the visualization of meteorological
pictures.
V. S OFTWARE USED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE
PROTOTYPE
The software used for the development of the prototype
consists of: the Raspbian operating system, the GNU Radio
Companion tool and the WXtoImg software. Furthermore,
the web application, it is implemented on a LAMP server.
A. Raspbian O.S.
Raspbian is an operating system based on Debian
distribution, that was created and designed for Raspberry
Pi platform in 2012, and it is considered by the Raspberry
Pi Foundation as the most complete package and which the
best performance offers [8]. In the current work it is used
the Jessie version, which is the version 8.0 of the Raspbian
operating system.
B. GNU Radio
GNU Radio is a set of different files and applications
grouped in libraries for the digital signal processing, it
is a free distribution software licensed under the GNU
General Public License (GPL) version 3 [1], and can be
used in conjunction with SDR devices. GNU Radio uses
Python programming language, which is an interpreted
object-oriented language, which runs directly in the operating
system. To built a radio system (communications system) a
graph must be created, where the blocks used represent the
nodes and their connections represent the data flow.
In the current work it is used the GNU Radio Companion
(GRC) application, which is the GNU Radio graphical
environment. This application is a graphical tool based
on blocks that allows to create graphs of signal flows
and to generate source codes from the graphic flow. The
programming in GRC is very similar to that of Simulink in
Matlab [9].
C. WXtoImg
It is a software that allows the recording and decoding
of the signals coming from meteorological satellites as
well as the editing and visualization of the pictures. The
signals supported by the software can be in APT format
or in WEFAX format, which come from polar orbit and
geostationary orbit satellites respectively [10].
The WXtoImg software performs the decoding of the
signal in APT format, for which it needs that the amplitude
modulated signal (AM) to be sampled at 11025 Hz [10].
This sampling frequency value is configured by default in
the software, since the picture that is obtained depics the
luminance. To obtain the picture the software WXtoImg
assigns a color within a scale of grays based on the index of
modulation that presents the signal.
D. LAMP server
The use of a LAMP server is performed with the goal
of obtaining a dynamic web page for the display of the
meteorological pictures. The acronym LAMP refers to the
different modules that compose it, which are the following:
Linux operating system, Web Apache Server, MySQL
Database or MariaDB and PHP, Perl or Python programming
language.
The operating system as was mentioned above is Raspbian
Jessie, the other modules that are used for the LAMP server
are shown below:
a) Web Apache Server.
b) MySQL Database.
c) PHP programming language.
Each of the modules are installed on the Raspberry Pi,
allowing to the web application to display the different pictures
of the NOAA satellites.
VI. I MPLEMENTATION AND R ESULTS
The operation of the prototype for the reception of the
meteorological pictures shows in the Fig. 4.
It consists first of an antenna, which will be able to capture
the signal from the satellites NOAA, then, the RTL-SDR
module will work jointly with the application GNU Radio
Companion (GRC) across the interface USB of the Rapberry
Pi to process and to store the signal captured by the antenna,
once the signal has been obtained, with help of the software
WXtoImg the signal will be decoded to obtain the image.
Finally the image will be stored in a database, which will
work jointly with the web application.
For the visualization of the images through of the web
application, the Raspberry Pi across the Wi-Fi module, will
be connected to a wireless local area network (WLAN). The
connection to the local area network will be realized across
an AP (Access Point), see Fig. 4; therefore, all computers,
tablets, smart phones, etc. that are connected to the AP will
belong to the local area network and will be able to access the
images through their web browsers by placing the IP address
of the Raspberry Pi.
Fig. 4. Scheme of the prototype system of reception of meteorological
images.
Then, the implementation of the meteorological image
reception system is described based on each of the blocks
shown in Fig. 4.
A. Antenna Block
Since it is mentioned previously, a Quadrifilar Helical
Antenna (QHA) is used for the present article which allows
to capture the signal (electromagnetic wave) in APT format
transmitted by each of the three NOAA satellites. This
antenna presents circular right polarization and a wide
radiating diagram in the z plane, as can be seen in Fig. 5.
Fig. 5. QHA Antenna
B. RTL-SDR Module Block
This block refers to the RTL-SDR module that is used, it
will not be made any type of configuration directly, it will
only be necessary to know the different values of gain and
that also can be recognized and that works jointly with the
application GNU Radio Companion.
C. Acquisition Block
This block, with the help of the antenna and the RTL-SDR
module allows the processing and storage of the signal in
APT format.
As can be seen in Fig. 7 the scheme realized in the
GNU Radio Companion tool consists first of the RTL-SDR
Source block, which allows communication with the RTL-
SDR module; a Low Pass Filter block in which is set a cut-
off frequency of 19.5 KHz, value corresponding to half the
bandwidth of the signal in frequency-modulated APT format,
and a decimation value equal to 5, with the goal of reducing
the frequency of sampling. Also, the schematic consists of a
WBFM Receive block which is a demodulator by quadrature,
a Rational Resampler block to obtain a sampling rate of
11025 Hz from 51.2 KHz, a Multiply Const amplifier block
with a default value of 3, and lastly, an Wav File Sink
block that stores the signal in amplitude modulated (AM) APT
format as an audio file with a .WAV extension.
The elements that are part of the system prototype are:
Quadrifilar Helical Antenna, BNC-SMA pigtail, RTL-SDR
module, Raspberry Pi with the software mentioned in section
V, an HDMI cable and a monitor to observe the meteorological
images; as can be seen in Fig. 6.
Fig. 6. Diagram of connection of the system of reception of meteorological
images.
For the NOAA-19 satellite case, the spectrum of the signal
in frequency-modulated APT format after passing through the
low-pass filter can be seen in Fig. 8.
 Fig. 7. Reception scheme in GNU Radio Companion.
Fig. 8. Signal amplitude spectrum in frequency modulated APT format.
D. Decoding Block
This block refers to the WXtoImg software, which decodes
the .WAV extension audio file, which is previously stored by
the GNU Radio Companion tool, to obtain the meteorological
image. This decoding is done by a command that is executed
in the Raspberry Pi shell, this command is the following:
“wxtoimg [-a] [-b] [-e option] input.wav image.png”. For this
article this command allows to obtain an image of channel
A, an image of channel B and a thermal image.
E. Storage and Visualization Block
This block refers, firstly, to the storage of all meteorological
images obtained from each of the three NOAA satellites,
using a database that is based on a relational model and
scripts developed in Python, PHP and HTML. Second,
reference is made to the visualization of meteorological
images by implementing a web application, in which you can
choose which satellite you want to see the images from.
It is necessary to mention that a script was developed using
the Python programming language so that the acquisition,
decoding and storage tasks are performed automatically.
Also, since the crossing of the NOAA satellites on the
Ecuadorian mainland is different for each day, due to the type
of orbit that they describe, it makes use of the web scraping
technique to obtain the exact time at which NOAA satellites
are transmitting over the Ecuadorian mainland; for in that
precise moment begin to perform the above tasks.
In the Table 1 shows the average percentages of CPU load
of the Raspberry Pi during the execution of the scheme of
Fig. 7 for the acquisition of the signal in APT format, during
the decoding of .WAV extension audio file using WXtoImg
software, during storage of images in the database and during
the use of the technique of web scraping.
TABLE I
CPU LOAD OF R ASPBERRY P I
Tasks % Of CPU load
Acquisition 42%
Decoding 26%
Storage 2%
Web scraping 30%
Then, the A-channel, B-channel and thermal image meteo-
rological images obtained from the APT signal transmitted by
the NOAA-19 satellite are shown.
 In the case of APT format signals transmitted by the NOAA-
15 and NOAA-18 satellites, the results were similar to those
shown in the case of the NOAA-19.
VII. C ONCLUSIONS
• The RTL-SDR module used in this article tuned correctly
each of the three transmission frequencies (137.1 MHz,
137.9125 MHz and 137.62 MHz) in the APT format of
the NOAA satellites and the GNU Radio Companion
(GRC) application, allowing a satisfactory visualization
the signal in frequency-modulated APT format.
• By means of the utilization of the Web Scraping tech-
nique and the Python programming language, the code for
the automation of the prototype system was developed in
the present article. As a result, there is a fully automatic
satellite meteorological imaging system, thus avoiding
Fig. 9. Image of channel A from NOAA-19 satellite.. possible human errors and the need for an operator to
carry out the tasks of acquisition, decoding and storage.
• The GNU Radio Companion graphical interface (GRC) is
an intuitive, easy-to-use and ideal tool for students, teach-
ers and researchers in the development of communication
systems, as well as in signal analysis.
• The WXtoImg software allowed the successful decoding
of amplitude modulated (AM) signals to an image format;
for the case of this article to a .png extension image.
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Fig. 11. Thermal image from NOAA-19 satellite.