Our goal for next summer is to be able to pick up weatherfax via radio. There's no way we'll rely on satellite again for downloading grib files. Our winter is dedicated to learning more about this sort of thing, and doing experiments.
@neauoire Any thoughts on how you'll recieve and decode the transmissions yet?
@cathos we've started collecting notes, there seems to be a sort of gradient here, from usb gizmos we could use near the shore, to quite cumbersome antennas to allow us to grab the signal when we're offshore.
We've got a little collection of software to handle the transmission, it's mostly windows stuff but I found two that'll work on linux. We haven't really done much experimentation in that so far so it's all fresh
@neauoire @cathos You don't really need any fancy antenna to receive wefax on HF. On a boat you're supposed not to have too much noise. You just put up a small wire dipole on the mast and you're good. As others said, just use fldigi and an old HF receiver. I just received this map on 11MHz with my kiwiSDR.
Here you find the schedules:
https://www.weather.gov/media/marine/rfax.pdf
@zabow @neauoire @cathos I get pretty good results with just a simple HF receiver (Sony ICF-SW7600GR) and the "HF Weather Fax" app on my Android phone.
I received this image an hour ago by just putting my phone next to the speaker of the receiver, so I didn't even use a cable to connect. Also, the receiver was placed indoors in our living room in a city - no additional outdoor antenna.
@zabow @neauoire @cathos Oh no, you would definitely need to connect the devices with a cable. :)
I was just trying to say that if you can get good results with a very minimalist setup in a bad location with a lot ot interference, then you'll shurely be able to get awesome results out on the ocean.