We are back with a very fresh SatDump version (given the incoming winter, it better be!), almost exactly a month after the last release!
We are now maintaining a quicker paced release cycle to avoid users relying too much on unstable nightly builds that can break at any moment. We hope you appreciate this choice!
New Features
HIRS Calibration Available
HIRS (High-resolution InfraRed Sounder) is an instrument flown on NOAA-15, NOAA-18, NOAA-19 and Metop B. It is a 19-channel infrared sounder (plus a single visible channel) that is specially tailored to detect and measure parameters such as water vapor content, cloud top temperature and ozone at different altitudes.
Thanks to tremendous efforts from Zbychu all the HIRS instruments are now fully calibrated both on HRPT as well as on DSB. Unfortunately, the instrument onboard Metop B was permanently turned off due to failure, so it will not be supported.
With the addition of calibrated composites by lego11, it is now possible to receive everything (and we really do mean everything) that is needed for a basic 3-day weather forecast with only a laptop, SDR and V dipole, greatly improving the usefulness of both the satellite constellation and SatDump as a whole.
Lego’s weather forecasting guide will be updated shortly to account for these new features.
GOES-R HRIT DCS Support
The GOES Data Collection System, or DCS, is a system of over 40,000 Data Collection Platforms (DCPs) throughout the Americas that collect meteorological, hydrological, and other environmental information. The information available over GOES DCS can include river/creek/pond levels, precipitation accumulators, and air/water temperature. There are also DCPs that track more advanced things like the number of fish through a stream, the amount of water in wood (to evaluate fire risk), water pH level/amount of dissolved oxygen, wind speed, wind direction, and more. These platforms transmit their data to the GOES weather satellites that, in turn, rebroadcast it to ground stations.
Thanks to work from Jamie, SatDump can now decode and parse this data as it is relayed over HRIT. The data is available in the UI when decoding live, but it is also saved to json files for further processing. You can even filter the DCPs that you are monitoring just to those you choose - with 40,000 platforms, there can be a lot of noise! 18,000 of the DCPs are tracked by HADS, and you can find ones near you here.
As a note, this decoder currently works on the HRIT transmission at 1694.1 MHz, and not the transponder lower in L-Band, or directly from DCPs on the ground. Additionally, support for NOAA/Metop Argos-A DCS and Meteor SSPD will come in the future, but requires more work. These sensors are sometimes different, and can include other data such as weather baloon telemetry, hazardous material tracking, fishing vessel tracking, and animal tracking.
AWS Dump support
In 1.2.0, SatDump already had support for the Arcitic Weather Satellite (AWS)’s L-Band DB, thanks to Aang23. In 1.2.1, Julia added support for AWS dumps that are being tested over Europe, containing an entire orbit’s worth of data. As an added bonus, NAVATT data is now decoded as well - consisting of navigational telemetry.
AWS is still in testing mode, and the local DB has not been seen in the last month. It is not uncommon to see no signal from the sat, or to get no imagery from it. Over the next few months, we should get a better idea of what data to regularly expect from AWS.
New Composites and Fixes to Old Composites
Many composites added by lego11 for HIRS as well as SEVIRI, FCI, AVHRR and MODIS. Also, Night Microphysics was fixed on all supported instruments and is now identical to what EUMETSAT provides.
New composites include:
- Split Window Difference (AVHRR, MSU-MR, SEVIRI, MODIS, FCI)
- Cloud RGB (AVHRR, MSU-MR)
- Calibrated Water Vapor (HIRS, MODIS, SEVIRI, FCI)
- Differential Water Vapor RGB (HIRS, MODIS, SEVIRI, FCI)
- IR108-WV62 Difference (HIRS, MODIS, SEVIRI, FCI)
- Split Ozone (HIRS)
- Split Water Vapor (HIRS, SEVIRI, FCI)
- Temperature soundings for HIRS
Initial Meteor-M BIS-M support
Jamie has introduced initial support for the BIS-M onboard information system of Meteor-M satellites. Thanks to that, a few bugs regarding the date on HRPT Meteor passes have been resolved. For example, it is no longer necessary to set the date manually and also the projections work even with Meteor passes that happen exactly at Moscow midnight (when the time on Meteor-M rolls over).
In the future it will also be possible to parse the state vectors from BIS-M, avoiding small errors when projecting Meteor-M imagery.
Misc Features
- Added support for an alternate KMSS mode that Meteor-M N°2-4 has recently started transmitting (thanks Julia)
- Added support for CS32/32-bit Integer WAV basebands
- Several memory optimizations
- Added support for new GEOSCAN platform (Thanks to Foxiks)
- If RTL-SDR fails to set frequency, an error will now be displayed
- Renamed Elektro-L L-band TLM to the correct name (Elektro-L GGAK)
Bug Fixes
With the regular cold spells coming down from an ever weakened polar jet stream, the bugs are dying at an alarming rate. At least there is ONE good thing amongst the several thousand BAD things that can happen with an ever warming global temperature!
- Fixed a bug that prevented the use of Space-Track API due to changes on their end.
- Fixed a bug that affected the recording/playback of cs16 basebands and audio files, that could lead to distortion or clipping of the signal.
- Spam-clicking the download button in the Official Archives window will no longer result in multiple downloads.
- Retuned Meteor-M N°2-3 and N°2-4 projections.
- Fixed a crash when parsing bogus HIRS data.
- Fixed a few crashes when decoding NOAA APT data.
- Malformed composites in the satdump_cfg.json or settings.json will no longer crash SatDump.
Statistics
- Number of times penguin overlords were appeased: 1
- Number of times Jamie had to fix stuff because Lego broke it: 3
- Number of times Lego fell in love with an instrument: 5
- Number of commits related to Water Vapor: 9
Wrapping Up
As always, if you come across any bugs, feel free to open an issue on GitHub or reach out to us on Matrix! We encourage using one of these forms of communication instead of emailing SatDump team members directly, to help speed up issue resolution.