A huge amount of progress was made today with AGS reception! It is hard to contain the excitement while writing this weather note. After several months exploring ‘herringbone’ distortion patterns and deep diving into NOAA APT + Raspberry Pi tutorials, the team found an ‘instructable’ tutorial via which several people seemed to be receiving relatively long and clear NOAA images. In this tutorial, Grayson noticed a filter option for rtl_fm called -F 9 that we hadn’t tried to implement in the AGS code yet, and he added it in an update yesterday. Last night, the roof mounted turnstile in Florida had to be taken down due to a lightning storm and ‘extreme’ tornado warning. Yet even though it was up against a garage wall and under an overhang, the last evening pass of the day yesterday showed telemetry data at the top and bottom of the image, where previous captures only recorded static.

This morning, despite an ongoing storm and tornado warning, the Turnstile was positioned out on the front lawn for a 70 degree max elevation pass shortly after 11:40. In stark contrast to previous ‘letterbox’ type images in which satellite data only appeared in the central strip of the recording, today the image is significantly longer and clearer, with telemetry data clearly showing through static at the beginning and end of the pass. Also, the typical ‘herringbone’ type distortion seen in all previous images appears to be gone! More testing will verify this but at present this is something to celebrate.