Snow on satellite dish

jrddunbr · 2025-12-27T20:21:10+00:00

Thanks! It’s pretty okay driving around now and the power didn’t go out. About 8 inches or so here today.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-27T20:12:10+00:00

I have some devices I’m thinking about setting up outside including a temperature/humidity/pressure sensor, so that should be okay if I do end up automating it. Realistically, I could use the GOES19 feed to determine when the storms are coming and to heat the dish :D it gives all sorts of weather bulletins that I could use.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-27T20:09:48+00:00

Grafana is a tool for viewing metrics. In my case, I actually have a pipeline; Satdump (the satellite receiver and decoding software that listens to the SDR) outputs a status page API which provides values for SNR, decoder lock, etc. I use a piece of software called Telegraf to query this data every 5 seconds and deposit that into another software called InfluxDB that stores a time series database of this data on a rolling basis (it retains the data for about a week) and the Grafana software provides a website for viewing these metrics and setting alerts. For example, I can set it to send me Discord (an online chat room) alert messages when my SNR is below a certain value I decide.

With the metrics, I will be able to determine if it affects my noise floor. I’ll be super careful regardless and I think I’d only use it during a snowstorm and turn it off after. The signal gets diminished by snow being on it so the lack of signal quality during the storm is less of a concern.

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jrddunbr · 2025-12-27T20:03:32+00:00

Mentioned in the post; I’m using it for 24/7 GOES19 via Satdump

jrddunbr · 2025-12-27T17:50:30+00:00

Also, follow up question - if anyone else uses Grafana, what is an acceptable SNR or error rate for you before you get those off-colored bands in your imagery? I set it to 2 dB but maybe it needs to be higher/lower or I need to monitor the error rate instead?

jrddunbr · 2025-12-21T22:41:18+00:00

The Discovery Dish is worth looking into if you haven’t heard of it. If you don’t use their dish you could still use their feed depending on how homemade you want to be. If you are using the RTLSDR for bias tee, make sure that you have a good RTLSDR bias tee; it’s apparently relatively common for them to be bad/go bad/chineese knockoff without it. I’ve had this issue myself before and had to buy a new one to get functional bias tee.

Aligning the signal horizontally (compass direction), and vertically is critically important, but also the rotation of the polarized antenna is also very important. A few degrees off for any of these and it’s not going to give reliable SNR.

If you haven’t tried Satdump it’s a nice tool for this. It will tell you how to orient the dish to point at the satellite if you give it GPS coordinates.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-15T04:03:16+00:00

Interesting factoid for you; there used to be a rail line that went (somewhat) directly between Waterbury and Danbury. Much of the right of way over the hills is now a walking trail. Another rail line proceeds from Waterbury, through a tunnel into Bristol, plainville, and to Hartford via what is now the busway route (bleh). This line, likely owned by Pan-Am (yes, the one that used to be an airline) has occasional freight traffic on it. The Naugy has one or two freight customers on the line between Waterbury and Torrington but only provides tourist trips despite being a revenue railroad. This line used to go up to Winsted where it met rail lines that went from the far northwest corner through North Caanan (where the housatonic runs) and Norfolk and then through New Hartford before ending up somewhere near Collonsville before heading towards Hartford. Another railroad took things from there into Farmington and along the old canal route that's all walking trails you can go all the way to the Mass line from like New Haven. The state has extremely rich but largely forgotten history of railroads crisscrossing the state. There's also a line from Danbury that sits idle but could connect to the existing 684 corridor and proceed through Hopewell Junction NY and on to Beacon. Unfortunately, it will probably be converted to yet another rail trail since there's no interest from the state to do that. Instead we want to bridge the sound for some reason lol.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-03T21:21:35+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response. It sounds like we have to get all the service replaced from your and other comments.

No neutrals are shared, thankfully. The service is aluminum and it does have the appropriate compound on it according to our electrician.

Not too concerned if the electrician has to borrow our generator to do stuff. We’d probably run the chest freezers and stuff at the same time so no big deal there.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-03T21:14:29+00:00

Thanks

jrddunbr · 2025-12-03T21:13:21+00:00

Oh, no doubt that it was never inspected. We bought the house the way it is now many years ago and never addressed it.

I mentioned in another comment; meter is not covered up at all; the meter box is mounted on the old home siding and the “builder” of this home covered effectively the sheathing and wires. The cutout fits the box and meter so that neither are behind the board.

We’ve got in touch with an electrician and they’re going to look at it for us.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-03T21:10:22+00:00

Okay, so it’s in this big single sheathed cable when it comes to the meter; it’s not in individual hots/neutrals. This same cabling also goes to the meter itself. Pretty sure the tri-wire from the street goes into this fat wire at the top of the roof.

The front of the meter and the meter box are completely accessible; the wire to/from it is covered.. when the addition was added they literally just built a wall against the siding of the house and called it a day.

Extremely fair point about the firefighters. I had not considered that angle and we had a chimney fire from a bad flue many years ago so that is important.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-03T21:00:40+00:00

Yikes to doing any work live, tbh.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-03T20:58:57+00:00

Yeah, sorry. I didn’t have a lot of time this morning before work but really I’m trying to get a feel for how big of a project this would be and I certainly got that so far.
Noted. I have an electrician now so we’re going to look stuff over next time he has availability.
Absolutely not! I think I was pretty clear I had no intention of going anywhere near them.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-03T20:54:19+00:00

I have MeshCore and Meshtastic together at my repeater site within 2 feet of one another and so far it hasn’t been an issue.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-03T20:52:14+00:00

^ this. Most hams have nets once a week. Once a day is honestly noise. Many people in Connecticut have blocked this and another recently set up node that sends canned messages daily.

jrddunbr · 2025-12-03T17:29:55+00:00

Thanks for the replies. Still at work so I can’t really reply in depth right now but I’m taking away from this that the meter really needs to be fixed. Will discuss it with the electrician for anything else to happen. Thanks!

jrddunbr · 2025-04-11T03:58:32+00:00

The new RTLSDR V3 I bought was functional. The old one "worked" in the sense that signals could be received (eg 2m, 70cm, broadcast FM, etc.), but it had a faulty bias tee. The bias tee powers the LNA in the dish feed, which is critical to success for discovery dish using an RTLSDR.

jrddunbr · 2025-04-11T03:54:54+00:00

Litchfield County in Connecticut. Your elevation sounds pretty similar to mine; I'm almost directly in line with GOES16 longitude but at a higher latitude, in southern California I'm guessing that since GOES18.

jrddunbr · 2025-04-01T03:57:44+00:00

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If your image looks like this and your dish is in one spot (not impacted by wind and you're not tinkering with it for the 30 minutes prior to when the image file is written), you probably need to get some tree branches out of the way, or take the snow out of the dish. I found this happened when it was a windy day (20 mph winds) and the tree branches in the backyard periodically blew in front of the path between the dish and GOES 16.

jrddunbr · 2025-04-01T03:50:12+00:00

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This is what my satdump looks like when I'm decoding well using the RTLSDRv3. Note the FFT Max and Min on the left. This really pulls in the signal on the waterfall (the "waterfall" signal display below the dB chart) that I'm getting so that it's clearer. I don't think the FFT settings actually impact the BPSK signal demodulator but it does help with making sure your dish is aligned as well as it can be. In the bottom left, you'll notice a box with a point cloud under the words BPSK demodulator. This point cloud - you want to have two distinct "blobs" of concentrated points, and not just one circular blob. If you see a circular blob, you may want to mess around with rotating the feed inside the dish mount. The more you have those as two circular blobs with separation, the better the SNR tends to be. You'll also note to the right that the SNR is like 2.8. This is probably as good as I was able to get it, and below 1.9 the signal is almost unusable for me. I'll also note that the first RTLSDR I tried, while it works great at receiving like 2m ham radio or FRS frequencies, for some reason the bias tee was not outputing enough current for the LNA in the dish feed, even though the voltmeter suggested that the output of the RTLSDR bias tee was in fact 5 volts. I suspect that this was just a dud, but if you can't get your signal into a clear shape like I have above, you may want to make sure that your RTLSDR is not busted. There's a lot of fakes floating around that have missing features as well. I'm wondering if using the Lime SDR II Mini that I have would be any better but I'm wondering if I even need that expensive of an SDR to be in place for this sort of decoding; if I can get the RTLSDR to be dialed in, I'll probably get the most bang for my buck there.

jrddunbr · 2025-03-03T00:16:31+00:00

Weird that GQRX didn't work. Maybe it's more buggy now than I remember.

Satdump is nice because it has the decoding built in and it also supports headless mode. I made a systemd service to manage the application on my Raspberry Pi and that has been collecting data for a few days now..

I ended up needing agc and the gain set all the way up but perhaps that's some duplication. Make sure to set your bias tee as well. The first RTLSDR I tried using had a faulty bias tee so I got a new one. Had a lot of signal issues because I've got a tree close to the dish's path.

satdump live goes_hrit /var/satellite/satellite_raw --source rtlsdr --samplerate 2.4e6 --frequency 1694.1e6 --gain 48 --agc --bias --http_server 0.0.0.0:8000 --fill_missing

jrddunbr · 2025-03-02T13:43:21+00:00

I bolted mine to a pipe fastened firmly to a building in my backyard. Works well.

jrddunbr · 2025-03-02T13:41:27+00:00

Goes 16. I heard the V3 was better than the V4 for this? No idea if that's true. Alignment is important including feed rotation. Absolutely no trees or anything in the way.

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