Meteosat Wefax Ground station
System Configuration
Our ground station occupies a roof-top location here on the main campus
at The University of Nottingham. It consists of the following elements:
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2.5m parabolic dish with dipole antenna
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1.7Gig to 137Meg down-converter (TimeStep Electronics).
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2 x 137Meg FM receivers (TimeStep Electronics).
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2 x custon designed DSP decoder cards, one for each dissemination channel,
which plug into...
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Master PC - runs the receiver software & hosts the master archive (2GBytes)
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An uninterruptable PSU supplies all the above equipment
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Fibre optic private ethernet link to SATPIX archive server - holds the
public copy of the archive.
The master PC is linked to the NT server over a private ethernet, the server
is linked to the campus network via a second, independent ethernet port.
When a new image arrives it is immediately copied to the SATPIX server
and subsequently on to ftp.nottingham.ac.uk via the campus network. The
ftp machine provides the most popular "latest" web & ftp services,
while SATPIX hosts the image archive.
The hardware design and software sources for our PC hosted, TMS320C25
based WEFAX DSP decoder board are available for download to non
commercial users: DSPSTUFF.ZIP & DSPMORE.ZIP.
Note however that the decoder is NOT a low-cost or easy-to-build design,
it is recommended for wealthy, experienced electronics engineers only,
furthermore we are not able to offer any technical support for this project.
Steve Marchant, CCC