Corsicana Weather Radar
We (Corsicana Weather Radar) are starting a new project to put together a Noaaport receiving station. It will be located at our radar facility in south-western Corsicana Texas. We already have a massive 14 foot conical horn earth station antenna made by Antennas for Communications which we were able to get several years ago, but have yet to put it in service. The antenna needs a lot of TLC as you can see by some recent photos.
The conical horn antenna was chosen over the smaller C band dishes you normally see due to the fact that is is located along side two radar towers/transmitters. One S band radar and one C band radar. Noaaport operates on C band also. The conical horn operates in high terrestrial interference areas where parabolic antennas fail to work.
We intend to begin work on the dish this weekend. We will attempt to point it towards the satellite (AMC4) to see if we can get the signal using some test equipment. We currently do not have the actual satellite receiver, which will probably be a Novra S75 DBV-S.
Updated Jan 10, 2008
Today we were able to get A/C power to the dish. After a few problems we were successful at getting the antenna to move. We got it pointed (both in azimuth and elevation) towards the AMC4 satellite, at least in the ball park. Since we could not get the feedhorn put on today we could not do any signal test. We have arranged for a lift truck to get us up to the top of the cone next week to add the feedhorn. We had to make our own coupling to go between the azimuth motor and gearbox. You can see that and more photos of the days work at link below.
Photos from first day of work on dish
Updated Jan 12, 2008
We now have the Novra S75 satellite receiver. The software has been loaded and setup (as best as I can without data coming in). The new LNB's should arrive anytime now. This weekend we may be able to install the LNB's and start looking for live data from the satellite, depending on the weather and if we can get a man-lift to the site.
Updated Jan 21, 2008
It's been a while since I updated this. We have had the Noaaport system operational for a couple of months, but the dish / feedhorn is not operating as it should. We have now acquired another dish and will soon move over to it. It is a 10 foot parabolic dish. After completion of the new dish installation and testing we should be able to start using the data full time. When testing is done I will start adding the data to our web site.
Updated May 1, 2008
We now have our 10 foot dish installed and are receiving live Noaaport data with it. Current Noaaport images at link below.
Operational Noaaport Images Here
Updated May 12, 2008
Software and computers used in the Noaaport project
We are starting out with a computer we already had. It has a 2.4 GHz processor and 160 gig hard drive. It now has 1 Gig of RAM.
It will be running Fedora 8 Linux OS. This system will run the software suit Noaaport Broadcast System Processor (nbsp). It's main purpose is to receive, process, and distribute the data that comes from the Noaaport data stream.
It also has Gempak which is an analysis, display, and product generation package for meteorological data. We will probably need to get a faster computer once we start receiving real data from the satellite.
Updated Jan 16, 2008
Some of the reasons for having our own Noaaport ground receiving station are:
