Herodotus wrote in
:

Larry,
I have looked at these links and have spent the last few hours
wandering about the web. What I cannot find out is whether I can
receive these photos south of the equator. Seems like a great system
at a reasonable cost. Can you advise please.

cheers
Peter
N.Z. yacht Herodotus


Peter, the Satellite Services Division of NOAA, our weather bureaucrats,
is on :
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/
with full access to all weather products that come down from the birds.

The birds do an extensive tropical zone picture set every few hours that
come down on 137 Mhz. They also take a "full disk" picture of the whole
hemisphere you may find useful. However, their sector scans appear to be
limited to the northern edge of South America up to Canada...the
Caribbean and USA. If there is some particular weather of interest to
the US Military or commercial interests, they make special arrangements
to photograph it in IR/Visible/Water Vapor if it's over the bird's
horizon, including South America.

Of course, Geostationary Equatorial satellites, even so high up, cannot
see the very high latitudes in either direction. The website also
contains MITSAT pictures from the Antarctic, south of NZ to Siberia.
These satellites are over your horizon for direct contact, making it
impossible.

Full disk images from Meteosat:
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GMIR.JPG
are also from this website, which covers the whole South Atlantic in its
full disk pictures. I'm not sure what frequency Meteosat operates on for
direct download of its pictures. Search Google for Meteosat schedules
and you should be able to find them with the transmission times. South
America is on the western edge of Meteosat's view from over Africa. This
bird's pictures are fantastic as they show the spawning grounds of the
hurricanes headed for me.

A massive gallery of GOES pictures from the two 137 Mhz birds is stored,
forever I think, on:
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/misc...ng_images.html
which will show you what kind of pictures it takes, including the
Southern region.
Here's a tropical cyclone off the Brazilian Coast:
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/misc/040326/040326.html
Those pictures would be available on the 137 Mhz receiver from
Hamtronics. However, I do not see a "regular schedule" of South Atlantic
pictures, probably as it would require too much precious fuel to spin the
bird around all the while to take them.

Larry
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