Meteor M2-4: Receiving Weather Satellite Images from My Garden in San Francisco

A hobbyist in San Francisco recorded and decoded live weather-satellite transmissions from Meteor M2-4 using a simple V-shaped dipole, an SDRplay RSPdx-R2, and a laptop. Meteor M2-4, a Russian sun-synchronous satellite carrying the MSU-MR six-channel scanner, transmits LRPT data at 137.900 MHz during brief passes. The operator recorded about 12 minutes of IQ data at 2 MS/s, tracked the LRPT OQPSK signal (72 ksym/s), and used SatDump with Viterbi and Reed-Solomon error correction to recover CADU frames. A waterfall display guided tuning; reception peaked near 62° elevation but faded early due to a house obstruction. No second downlink at 137.100 MHz was observed.

The decoded output produced three 1,568 × 3,192-pixel grayscale channels (visible 0.50-0.70 µm, near-IR 0.70-1.10 µm, mid-IR 3.50-4.10 µm) and several false-color composites geolocated over the northeastern Pacific and western North America. Images contain horizontal gaps (about 10-11% fully missing rows per channel) and cannot serve as temperature maps because no longwave thermal channel was captured. Processing notes document center frequencies, sample rates, decoder locks, SNR snapshots, and limitations: missing image-assembly script, one channel differing from saved source, and documented steps for reproducing the figures. The project demonstrates that modest amateur gear can retrieve usable multispectral satellite imagery, with predictable constraints from antenna geometry, pass timing, and partial data loss.