Dr. Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer, the team behind the Open-Weather project have recently announced the launch of their new version of open-weather apt, a web-based NOAA APT image decoder. The web-based program accepts a WAV file containing a NOAA satellite APT recording, demodulates and decodes it, and displays the resulting weather satellite image.

Sasha writes:

In our recent newsletter, we summarised the updates as follows:

Open-weather apt is the only public, maintained, browser-based decoder for Automatic Picture Transmissions (APT) from satellites NOAA-19, NOAA-18 and NOAA-15. It was developed to improve access to satellite signal decoding for all practitioners.

We are excited to share a new and improved version available here! The new version includes the following updates and additional features:

• Improved accuracy in decoding and finding sync positions (locates more sync positions than other comparable decoders)
• Upload a WAV file of any sample rate (no more re-sampling with Audacity!)
• Option to see the ‘raw’ image without syncing, and to ‘Find the Syncs’
• Option to Rotate 180 degrees, often useful for viewing images from nighttime passes
• Go deeper in your analysis: explore Signal Value and Image Value Histograms
• Upload directly from open-weather apt to the Public Archive

Open-weather apt is co-developed by open-weather with Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Dan Powers), Bill Liles (NQ6Z) and Grayson Earle. We have had a lot of fun testing and experimenting. Please let us know if you have feedback!