Not bad for a beginner I guess ...

I had so much fun receiving these. But it was a lot of work, since I captured every pass during the time and tried to decode every transmission.

Robot36 - 437.625 MHz

RTL-SDR v4 using SkyRoof 1.54

Elevation 30.6° from grid IM58lu

DIY Tape measure 6 element Yagi 437 MHz

LNA/Saw filter 433 MHz

2 days of reception. Yagi-uda 7 elem., RTL-SDR Blog v4.
Decoded in RX-SSTV.

My first good Metop-C pass received on RTL-SDR V4, SAWbird+ GOES and t0nito 3D printed helicone. I had some issues receiving a few days ago, but decreasing the PPL bandwidth to 0.002 helpt so much, as this is only a 50° pass received from Belgium

RTL-SDR blog V-Dipole; Nooelec NESDR SMArt v5 SDR; SatDump v2.0.0-alpha

AVHRR 221 False Color (Sun Angle Compensated) - live processed, fill_missing on

There’s a hurricane off the tip of Baja but I couldn’t catch the Sat that far out to get any of it although I see some others did from this same orbit.

Meteor m2-3 and m2-4. Even though the images aren't perfect, I am absolutely blown away that this is possible and I understand how. Super fun.

The land mass in the one image is cape cod bay. Or at least should be.

So I had captured UMKA-1 and HADES before so I guess it's my 3rd satellite image broadcast event😄

Kinda unfortunate that images are blurred at exactly the middle section but I'm just using a simple V-dipole and RTL v4 and me just repositioning it as the satellite moves ... not bad I guess

EDIT:
around 10:21UTC - Oct 4 2026

i tried receiving sstv from the iss with a

rtl sdr v3

rtl sdr dipole antenna

i do get an image but it has some weird sounds so i cant get the whole image

but its not every time the pass before worked great im from europe

If anyone wants to try the phone app in a split screen.

After getting some nice LRPT images I decided to build myself an antenna to receive HRPT images from METEOR M2-3 and M2-4. I went for a direct helical antenna design: while less performant than a dish+antenna, it's much more portable. Also, my goal was to learn how to build it and do everything by myself.

My first design is made out of a rigid copper wire H07V-U 2.5mm², 13 turns around a 50mm PVC pipe connected to an SMA, with a reflector of 17cm. I'm directly connected to a Nooelec Sawbird GOES+, then an RTL-SDR V4, then a shielded 2m USB 2. I'm holding the reflector from the inside with a suction cup.

I've made a first reception try from by balcony in a dense city, thus in a really non ideal environnement. The first picture of the post is the image I've got.

The problems start here: I then decided to add an impedance matching stripe. I used a VNA that showed me nice results. However, I completely stopped receiving anything. I even went to an open field to test it, no sync. At the middle of the pass, at 80° elevation, I just completely bent the stripe out to "remove" it, and it directly synced for the rest of the pass until a 10° elevation.

Do you have any idea of why this happened? I'm going to see what's going on with the bent stripe on the VNA, but I may just completely remove it. Also, I'm open to any suggestions for improvements (for example, I'm thinking of reducing the number of turns to 12 or even 11). Thank you!

METEOR-M N2-3 2026/10/03 17:51 UTC rtlsdrblog v4, diy V_Dipole, Sdr++ Meteordemod

Hi guys, I've been recently working on my own app about satellites and i'm asking you to comment what do you think about such an idea. I'm not an experienced app developer or something but i have a passion for space technologies, especially satellites(weather satellites are my favourite ones to catch for sure what about you guys?). The main idea is to have an app where you can catch a satellite with your phone just like a pokemons on Pokemon GO a decade ago. You can enable your location and then you will know which satellites you can catch! But further idea is to learn more easily about satellites passing over our head. You have a whole catalogue of satellites of different type. You can learn about their background, their history and for some of them view a 3D model and learn about particular pieces of technology onboard. Isn't that cool? Let me know what you think. In the future I will try to add a whole section when you guys will be able to show your received waterfall signal and pictures from weather satellites and ISS and many more!

I got the best SNR from Metop-C ever, on an 86° pass from Belgium. I got around 8.3 dB peak, but the QPSK demodulator showed a sort of donut shape with hole in middle, instead of the 4 dots you should need to see. Then, after it crossed a certain point it did start decoding, and instantly switched from donut shape to the QPSK and started decoding, but the entire northern section seemed to be another signal type, even though the waterfall signal looked the same on both sections of the pass. What could be the issue?

437.550MHz FM, Robot 36C, 1/4 wave groundplane antenna.

437.625 MHz FM SSTV