Most recent received NOAAPORT images @ Los Alamitos, CA, US

The idea:

Our goal is to show how we setup a NOAAPORT via AMC receiving station. Hardware, dish + DVB-S card, are lowcost and can be found at craigslist and ebay. This system requires one Windows OS computer for receiving and decoding the data.

The receiving software, NOAAPORT Ear, is a WIN32 only software and the decoder, NOAAPORT Server, is cross platform. The server (decoder) can be located anywhere in the world and installed on any OS if wanted.

In our case, the receiver, NOAAPORT Ear, is at Los Alamitos, CA, USA and the decoder, NOAAPORT Server, and web-server is at Vasa, Finland on a Fedora machine for presenting the data received.

Free software presented here focus only on text products and satellite images. NOAAPORT disseminates over 1 million products (30+GBytes) every day.

A short PDF document on howto install and use the software.

Don't hesitate to ask questions!
Antenna issues: Jerry Martes
Software issues: Patrik Tast

Sample NOAAPORT data shown here is received at Los Alamitos, CA, USA by Jerry Martes, KD6JDJ and processed at Vasa, FI.
Browse received NOAAPORT data

How it works:

At the receiver station is a 2.4 meter dish pointed at AMC 4 101° West, Twinhan (or similar) DVB-S card and a software called NOAAPORT Ear installed on a windows machine. To the left is the signal strength shown using the Twinhan DVB-S card and VisionPlus software.
Read more how to get started at Hector's pages...


The client software is using the The Windows Packet Capture Library, WinPcap to save or forward data to the server from the bridged DVB receiver card. The saved data can also be analyzed with the Wireshark network protocol analyzer software.

Download the latest WIN32 NOAAPORT Ear client software:

Checkout the latest verison from SVN and build it yourself using Borland Builder C++.

http://noaaport.poes-weather.com:8081/subversion/noaaport-ear/trunk

Using the Windows client software:

The client software is installed at the receiver on a win2k OS or later machine and forwards the NOAAPORT data stream to anywhere in the world. Select first the bridged network connection from the NOAAPORT Device dropdown list. Then select ports you want to listen to by clicking on the Filter ports button. Text products are on port 1201 and binary such as images GRIB, BUFR are on the other ports (which not yet are supported).

Click on button Products and tick the ones you want the server to decode. There is a product configuration file for image- and text products in the install path\conf, add or disable products of interest to these. If you modify the file(s) you must restart the Ear. Notice also that the server product conf files must match.

If you want to send live data to the server tick option Stream to server. This option should only be used if the server is in the local area network. To decode data within an hour or so to a remote server click on button Dump to file and send in the Destination box. Select the file size, how many files and how many times it should be repeated. When the first dump is completed it will start sending to the server for decoding and publish the result on the www if wanted.

On the Server tab in the Dump options dialog tick Send dumps to server to automatically send dumps to server. If this is not ticked it will store dumps on your local disk and you can send them later by clicking on button Send dump file to server for decoding.

Set the retry send packet delay time it should wait if the server is busy.

Tick Delete dumps after sent to save hard disk space.



Tick EMail result and type your email address to receive a log from the server when the session is completed.

Decoder (server) software:

The cross platform server is built using Qt from Trolltech. It can also be compiled using C/C++ KDevelop. Images are created using Magick++ 8 bits/pixel library. zlib is also linked to the project.

If you want to build it yourself checkout code from SVN

http://noaaport.poes-weather.com:8081/subversion/noaaport-server/trunk

To use this softaware is almost identical to the Ear. To decode the METAR and TAF reports, a modified phpWeather and an enlarged database is used. Upon request the PHP scripts will be release. Follow the work in progress at SVN repository

Download the latest NOAAPORT Server WIN32 binaries and source code

Local time: Sunday, 1st August 2010 06:54 +03:00 EEST Europe/Helsinki

Copyright © Since 2002 Patrik Tast. Document updated on Sunday, 20th December, 2009 @ 14:38