Authors:
Edoardo Ardizzone
;
Alessandro Bruno
;
Francesco Gugliuzza
and
Roberto Pirrone
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy
Keyword(s):
Remote Sensing, Satellite Communication, Signal Processing.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Connectivity and Communication
;
Multimedia
;
Multimedia Signal Processing
;
Obstacles
;
Remote Sensing
;
Sensor Networks
;
Software and Architectures
;
Telecommunications
Abstract:
United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites adopt Advanced
Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors to acquire remote sensing data and broadcast Automatic
Picture Transmission (APT) images. The orientation of the scan lines is perpendicular to the orbit of the
satellite. In this paper we propose a new low cost solution for NOAA remote sensing. More in detail, our
method focuses on the possibility of directly sampling the modulated signal and processing it entirely in
software enabled by recent breakthroughs on Software Defined Radios (SDR) and CPU computational speed,
while keeping the costs extremely low. We aim to achieve good results with inexpensive SDR hardware, like
the RTL-SDR (a repurposed DVB-T USB dongle). Nevertheless, we faced some problems caused by hardware
limits such as high receiver noise figure and low ADC resolution. Furthermore, we detected several inherent
drawbacks of frequent tuner saturations. For thi
s purpose we developed a software-hardware integrated system
able to perform the following steps: satellite pass prediction, time scheduling, signal demodulation, image
cropping and filtering. Although we employed low cost components, we obtained good results in terms of
signal demodulation, synchronization and image reconstruction.
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