Project Profile: Selfies from Space
I’ve always been a space geek, interested in astronomy and cosmic travel. Recently I’ve become obsessed with a new space-related hobby – downloading images of the Earth as signals from weather satellites! I call this hobby “selfies from space” because the images are created in real-time; if the images’ resolution were greater and you had the ability to zoom in sufficiently, then you could see me standing outside with my antenna capturing the images. I first became interested in this hobby because I had purchased a $20 RTL-SDR (Software Defined Radio) on a whim many months ago, and decided to finally make some use of it. I did some research online and found that it was possible to capture satellite downlink data using my radio with an antenna tuned to receive the correct radio frequency. This means that the legs or poles of the antenna must have a specific length in order to resonate or vibrate at the desired radio frequency. The principle behind this resonance is similar to the phenomena of a tuning fork: when a vibrating tuning fork is placed near a stationary fork, the statio