There are a lot of things in the radio communications hobby that are exciting... but for many monitoring satellite communications is at the top of the list. One of the more interesting satellite monitoring targets are the NOAA low earth orbit satellites, which fly in sun-synchronous polar orbits around the earth and continuously transmit satellite photos. These picture transmissions occur in the 137 MHz band and are easily monitored with a scanner and easily decoded with free software. In this post, I'll review how I was able setup a process to receive and decode these pictures using an AOR AR5000 Radio, a computer with a sound card, and free decoding software.
http://radioreference.blogspot.com/
http://radioreference.blogspot.com/