Russian weather satellites fly 820 km over Dubai at 27,000 km/h. A simple wire antenna catches their whisper, and a Raspberry Pi turns it into pictures of the Earth.
Every picture travels through six stops. Tap any stop to jump to its story.
Two Russian weather satellites circle the Earth from pole to pole. As they fly, they photograph a strip of the planet below and beam the pictures straight down, live, to anyone listening. No subscription, no internet. Just a radio.
Each one passes over Dubai a few times a day, usually for 12 to 15 minutes. That's my window to catch it.
LRPT stands for "Low Rate Picture Transmission". It's a digital signal, so a good pass gives a clean, sharp picture with no static stripes.
Two metal arms, nothing more. A dipole works when its arms match the size of the radio wave. The Meteor signal has a wavelength of about 2.2 metres, so each arm is cut to roughly a quarter of that.
It's mounted with a clear view of the whole sky, from the northern horizon right round to the southern one. That matters: the satellites are loudest when they're high overhead, and anything in the way, like walls, roofs or buildings, eats the signal.
Golden rule: nothing overhead. An antenna with open sky above it beats a fancier one tucked under a roof every time.
By the time the satellite's signal reaches Dubai, it's incredibly faint. And Dubai is loud: FM radio stations, phone masts and a forest of other transmitters all shout on nearby frequencies.
The Nooelec SAWbird+ NOAA does two jobs in one small box. A sharp filter lets only the 137 MHz satellite band through and throws the rest away. A low-noise amplifier then boosts what's left, about a thousand times, before it travels down the cable.
Why it sits up at the antenna: every metre of cable loses a little signal. Boosting it before the cable, not after, keeps the picture clean.
SDR means "software-defined radio". This little USB stick doesn't play sound or show pictures. It simply listens to a slice of the radio spectrum and turns the wave into a stream of numbers, millions per second, that a computer can work with.
The NESDR SMArTee has a neat trick: it sends a small amount of power back up the antenna cable. That's what keeps the SAWbird+ running out at the antenna, with no extra power wires.
Two radios, one Pi: while the SMArTee waits for satellites, a second dongle tracks aircraft over Dubai and feeds them to Flightradar24.
A credit-card-sized computer that never sleeps. It runs headless (no screen, no keyboard) and does all the work by itself: it knows when each satellite will rise, starts recording at the right second, and stops when it sets.
I reach it from my desktop over the home network, or from anywhere through Raspberry Pi Connect. It can even go out into the field on a battery bank or a car charger.
The open-source software that turns the Pi into a ground station. It handles the whole job, from predicting passes to putting finished pictures on a web page I can open on my phone.
Example of the log format. SNR, the "signal-to-noise ratio", is the scorecard: the higher it is, the cleaner the picture.
This is the sky above the antenna, flattened into a circle. The centre is straight overhead, the edge is the horizon. Pick a pass to see the path the satellite will draw across it.
Passes are rated by how high they climb: above 30° is a great pass, 15° to 30° is worth a try, and lower than that is mostly noise. Times are Dubai time. Orbit data saved 27 Oct 2026, so times drift by a few seconds a day until it's refreshed.
The satellites I receive, or am about to try, on a globe you can spin. The two Meteors fly low and fast; Elektro-L, FengYun-2H and QO-100 sit still over the equator 36,000 km up (drawn much closer so they fit). The thin lines from Dubai show where to aim a dish. Drag to turn the globe, scroll or pinch to zoom, tap a card to fly there.
The page carries orbit data (a "TLE", short for two-line element set) saved on 27 Oct 2026. The fixed satellites stay accurate for weeks; the Meteors drift, so if a card says its data is more than a week old, open CelesTrak weather satellites and QO-100, copy everything and paste it below. It's kept in this browser only.
Questions about the station, a picture you'd like to see, or tips from a fellow satellite chaser? Drop me a line.