Ware Weather Fax Decoder

• 'Thanks for a fine piece of software!' - Ralph E. Taggart, Professor and Chair, Geological Sciences, MSU.
  

SatSignaldownload
SatSignalregistration - help support continued development!

What is SatSignal?

WXtoImg is a fully automated APT and WEFAX weather satellite (WXsat) decoder. The software supports recording, decoding, editing, and viewing on most versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. WXtoImg supports real-time decoding, map overlays, advanced colour enhancements, 3-D images, animations, multi-pass images, projection transformation (e.g. Mercator), text overlays, automated web page. PRINCIPLE: MeteoFax32 is a weatherfax decoding system. It decodes the Radiofax, RTTY, Sitor and Navtex formats using a specially designed modem. This modem provides filtering and digital signal processing with optimal performance making it usable from SSB pocket radios to HF marine transceiver.

EasyOverlay - Background Mode - night into day!

Weather and Fax Software. MeteoWare, meteorological freeware Freeware Synop Decoder in multilanguage format. Multi-fax Weather demodulator software, cards and antennas. Satfax Satellite weather decoding software, designed for those weather monitors who use their ICOM R7000, ICOM R7100 or AOR 3000A. WAVSat V2.0 (223K) Weather Satellite Tracking and APT Decode programm from S. Bonnett (UK) using the Soundcard FTV (relaese 1.0), a shareware program from Brian 9H1JS wich decodes FAX (FM/AM), SSTV and RTTY with a Soundblaster Card, Transmits FAX and SSTV. HF Weather Fax decoder for Android phones & tablets HF Weather Fax for Android decodes weather fax 120/576 charts and satellite images through the microphone of your Android phone or tablet. Just set your phone or tablet next to the speaker of your marine radio or any other shortwave receiver with sideband capability and start recording weather.

Can I register, and what do I get?

Users have asked to support this software by registering, so I have now providedthis facility. There are a number of extras for registered users includingmap overlays,input from bitmap (.BMP) image files, and the direct display of apparenttemperature. These are available upon registration. I would also likethose who use the program as a regular part of automated signal reception to considerregistering, hence the toolbar and batch operation are included in the registeredprogram. Click here for moreinformation about registering SatSignal.

• Registration provides
  • Faster operation through toolbar icons
  • Access to apparent temperature display in ºF or ºC
  • Access to overlay display of countries, states & grid-lines
  • Access to the EasyOverlay facility
  • Access to Background Mode - turning night passes into day
  • Access to image input options
  • Access to command-line parameters for fully automated operation
  • Ability to add your text to the image
  • Technical support

Please note that SatSignal 6 requires a newlicence code.

Requirements

If you get error messages about missing DLLs whenyou try to run SatSignal, please consult the library notes page.

• Register SatSignal - help support continued developments.
• Currently, you need WXtrack to get your location data into SatSignal, and it also is a convenient way to get the Kepler and country boundary data.
• System requirements
  • Display: 800 x 600 resolution or better, 15-, 16- 24- or 32-bit colour recommended. Be sure to calibrate your monitor
  • Windows -7 and later supported, earlier Windows may also work but are not supported
  • Memory: 128 MB or better. 256 MB highly recommended
  • Processor: Pentium 500 MHz or better
• Runtime Library Bundle (if you don't already have it).
• Got a question? Check the FAQ!
• If you collect your own data, be sure your PC is keeping accurate time.
• Want to ask a question - ask the self help group: https://groups.io/g/SatSignal
• If installing on Windows Vista, you may need the Microsoft WinHelp update.

Convert your SatSignal images to standard map projections withthe GroundMap program

Download SatSignal V6.0.0
(1,638,741 bytes; 2015-Apr-07; MD5 signature: 2FF629D29757DEDFB7086D14AAE7D71B)

Beta version: Check herefor the latest update.

Windows-7 and later informationplease read this is you have problems with the program's Help function.

• Please note that this download includes a 30-day trial of the full SatSignal-6. If you don't register within 30 days, it will stop working.
• Register SatSignal - help support continued developments
• Country boundary data (required for Easy Overlay if you don't have WXtrack, but you really should install WXtrack as an easy way to keep the Kepler data up-to-date)
• Colour lookup table - two CLUTs, one as used on Milan Konecny's weather satellite images, the other showing cloud-top temperatures overlaying the standard false-colour image
• Colour Lookup Tables (CLUTs)
  TonLindemann-CLUTs.zip (1.8MB) - stepped and smooth CLUTs from Dutch weather expert Ton Lindemann. (The file also includes land-sea LUTs for use with GeoSatSignal). They look for cold cloud tops allowing easier recognition of possible rainfall and severe weather. The readme is also updated with more information about meteorological use of enhancement of IR-satellite imagery. You can also refer to Ton's Web site (only in Dutch)
• Les Hamilton's Guide to processing APT weather satellite images using SatSignal.
• German language Read Me file for V4.0.0 (many thanks to Stefan and Robert Suffa)
• Spanish language readme file for V4.0.6 (many thanks to Enrique Carmenates Gonzalez)
• Spanish language Help file from Ferran Alegret's site => Descarga
• Be sure to calibrate your monitor correctly for best results
• Visit the SatSignal self-help group to discuss this software with other users.

If you like this software, you can rate it at the DXZone web site that listsrelated programs. Ratethis Software @ The DXZone. Be sure to register SatSignaland support continued development.

A self-help group is available for this software here:

LUTmaker

Download LUTmaker 1.0.6 (31,424bytes; 2001 Dec 12)

• Required library

Sample Images and related goodies

The sample images give an idea of theprogram's capabilities, but the large images are only one quarter of full size and do notgive a fair impression of the quality of the program's output. Typically, eachfull-size Meteor or Resurs picture would decode to either 1 MB JPEG or 3 MB BMP files. The two pictures of Iceland are full scale, and were taken within an hour of eachother on 1999 April 1. The NOAA image showing better contrast on the mountains,either because of the lower sun angle of the earlier picture or the stronger gammacorrection of SatSignal, but with the higher resolution is achieved by Meteor withSatSignal, the higher elevation of Meteor also producing a lower noise signal.

• WXReceiver program by George Ioannu - a utility to automatically record the APT signal of passing weather satellites with RS232 controlled receivers.
• SatTune program by Tim Seed to control a PCR-1000 radio
• Julian Moss has an automatic recorder called SatMon in the Softwaresection of his Web site.
• Want to check signal levels? Check out my SatLevelutility!
• Want to upload to your Web site automatically? Check out Brian Hamilton's Autosat Pic FTP utility.
• Want a sample NOAA wave file to check SatSignal? Download a recent 16 MB sample including the wave file and processed results - my signals and interference are not so good these days!

SatBatch

Program to drive the SatSignal and WXtrack programs for automated decoding of afolder full of mixed satellite wave files.

Requirements

The registered version of SatSignal is required to run this program. Nonew libraries are required. A Pentium 200MMX processor or better is recommended,with at least 32MB of memory.

Current release

Download SatBatchV1.9.0 (532,807 bytes; 2009 Jun 30)

NOAAplot

The program reads pass details from both WXtrack and SatSignal and plots thesignal quality as a function of the range and bearing from your location. Bybuilding up such data over a sequence of satellite passes, you can build up a picture of the antenna polar diagram, and detect any nulls in the polar diagram. It is also possible to compare antennas, and an example of such acomparison may be found here.

This is a free, unsupported utility. Please askquestions in the SatSignalself-help group.

Current release

Download NOAAplotV1.3.0 (62,113 bytes; 2006 Jun 25)

This modem is able to receive and transmit HF-Fax images, traditionally used for weather reports.

More technical information is available on the wikipedia article Radiofax.

Two modes are implemented IOC=576 or 288. The focus is made on black-and-white images, color mode is still experimental.

Many frequencies are available at http://www.hffax.com/ for example.

When entering any Wefax mode, the reception window opens, and optionally the transmit window. it is always possible to bypass this with the menu bar:

As for any modem, weather fax has its own tab in the configuration window.

Embedded vs floating display mode

There are two display modes for this modem:

• Embedded mode: This is the default mode, the normal receipt and transmit windows gets graphic (Like Hellschreiber mode).
• Floating mode: There are two separate windows for transmission and reception. This was the only available mode until fldigi 3.21.49.

Hide transmission window.

This option, allows to closed by default, the transmission window, when entering Wefax mode. In embedded mode, this means that the entire window is used for reception (Most common mode). In floating mode, this implies that the transmission window is not opened by default.However, it is always possible to manually open or close the transmission window at any time.

Logging messages to ADIF file

Each time an image is saved, it is possible to log this event, with the frequency and reception time, to the Adif file. This option is disabled by default.

Frequency shift adjustment

The default frequency is 800 Hz. However, it is possible to adjust for example to 850 Hz for Deutsche Wetter Dienst.

Maximum rows number

It non-continuous (Non non-stop) reception mode, an image is automatically saved when it has more than this number of lines (Default 2500 lines). Once this number of rows is reached, the image is saved and a new image is read with the same parameters. This feature has two applications:

• In automatic mode (APT control), if an image end is not detected, we can guarantee that the result will take no more than, for example, the size of two faxes. Typical faxes have about 1300 lines, so the max lines parameters can be tuned to, for example, 200 lines.
• In manual mode, where images are read continuously, this cuts the received images into chunks of equal size.

Destination directory for saved images

Received images are saved in the default folder

Ware Weather Fax Decoder Tool

$HOME/.fldigi/images (Linux) or <defaultpath>/fldigi.files/images

(Windows).

Additionally, they can be saved manually, at any time, using the button 'Save'. The PNG images received some extra text comments which can be displayed, for example, with GIMP.

Monochrome images

Fax images are monochromes and are saved as such by default. However, it is possible to bypass this parameter and save them as color RGB images.

To open the transmit window, you must of course select one of the two Wefax modems, and then right-click on the transmit (blue) window:

Then, the transmit window just opens. This is the same logic as sending MFSK images.

Then, you must open an image file using the button 'Load'. The image is then displayed, for example like that:

Now, to start the transmission, you just need to click 'Tx B/W' for black-and-white images, etc... During transmission, image reception is paused. The window will display each image line as it is sent. Please be patient, this may take a while. You might note that FlDigi status line displays the estimation transmit time, and the current stage (Start, phasing etc...); Color transmission ('Tx Color') is intentionally disabled at the moment.

To enter reception mode, one can click the 'View' menu tab, and select 'Weather Fax Image'.

Ware Weather Fax Decoder Number

At this time, the reception window opens. A big blank picture is visible, this is where the received image will be displayed. Several controls are available:

• Save: This allows to save the current image as a PNG file at any moment.
• Non-stop: At startup, the modem goes into automatic mode, and the text 'Abort' is displayed. When clicking 'Abort', this blanks the image and resets the APT detection. When 'Manual mode' is clicked, no APT detection is done. The Automatic/Manual mode is displayed in the reception window label.
• Pause/Resume: At any moment, the image reception can be paused and resumed (State is displayed in the reception window label).
• Zoom: This allows to zoom in/out the image.
• FIR: This allows to select an input FIR (Finite Impulse Response) filter. Practically, the narrow filter (Default value) gives the best results. The selected value is saved in the configuration file.
• Skip APT/Skip phasing: When in automatic mode, this allows to skip detection steps. This is often necessary when the signal is not very good.

When receiving an image, either in manual or automatic mode (APT control), other controls are displayed:

• Line: The number of the line currently received.
• Width: The image width in pixels. This is usually 1809, if LPM is 120.
• LPM: Lines per minute: Typically 120, can be 60, 90, 120 or 240. This is detected in automatic mode, but can be manually adjusted.
• Slant: This is used to adjust the slant of the image due to a clock inaccuracy. This value is saved in the configuration file, so it is not needed to reenter it each time.
• Center: This is used to manually adjust the horizontal center of the image, if it could not be detected in the phasing step.
• Auto: When this button is set, the image will be automatically centered. This process starts after some hundredth of lines are received, by shifting left and right the image. It takes some time to converge.

APT control reception mode

This mode uses the APT start and STOP frequencies to detect the beginning and end of an image. Additionally, it tries to detect the phasing signal - a wide black band - to detect the center of the image. This method is helped by the estimation of the signal power of these frequencies.

Manual reception mode (Non-Stop)

In this mode, the image is continuously read and displayed. When the maximum number of lines is reached, the image is saved and blanked, and the line counter returns to one.

Input FIR filters

There are three input Finite Impulse Response filters available. Here are their frequency characteristics:

Ware Weather Fax Decoder Download

Narrow filter, the default one, give the better results.

Centering an image

If the phasing was not automatically detected, the modem could not deduce the beginning of an image. The result is an image which is horizontally shifted. To correct this, one can use the 'Center' slider.

Picture with a slant

If either the send, receive or both ends of the transmission are using an uncalibrated sound card whose sampling rate is not an exact multiple of the sample rate the resulting picture at the receive end will appear slanted. The degree of slant is directly related to the accumulation of the frequency error at both ends of the transfer. Stations wishing to receive Weather fax pictures should calibrate their sound card.

The WWV calibration mode is used to measure and set the parts per million (ppm) correction factor for the sound card.

Your sound system may be fully corrected, but the sending station may have an uncorrected sound card. You can usually correct for small errors during reception by using the slant slider. Its value (Typically between - 0.005 and 0.005) will be stored in fldigi configuration parameters.

Automatic centering.

If the phasing signal could not be used for centering the image, the program waits for a string image signal anyway to go into reception mode, but it sets an internal flag allowing to automatically center the image. This feature can be freely enabled and disabled at any moment. it works by detecting a wide vertical band of about hundred pixels, where the sum of the contrast as the lowest among the complete image width.

That is: It computes for each row and each pixel, the absolute value of the horizontal derivate. It then sums these derivatives pixel-wise, row by row. Then, it computes an average of about hundred pixels along this single row. The column which has the lowest averaged contrast is considered to be the image margin, which is then shifted on the left of the window.

Ware Weather Fax Decoder Software

This method takes some time to stabilize, because at the beginning, there are many areas of the image, without details. It gets stable at the end, when only the margin stays with few contrasted details.

Image detection based on signal power

The APT control - inherited from the Hamfax signal, does not work very well when the image is noised. On the other hand, fldigi provides ways to evaluate the signal power on a given bandwith. This is used because APT control relies on the emission on specific frequencies.

Therefore, in the APT start and phasing loops, when check for the presence of strong signals associated to APT control. This information is used to take a decision when the traditionally method does not detect anything.

These two methods are interchangeable but used together for better detection.

AFC: Automatic Frequency Control

This option controls the frequency on the complete spectrum width. After several hunderads of lines have been correctly loaded (That is, with a high line-to-line correlation), the AFC locks until the frequency or mode is manually changed.

Noise elimination

This option eliminates short-lived noise, individual pixels with a different value from their horizontal neighbors. They are modified using median values. This is based on the fact that no line should be narrower than two pixels, otherwise such an image would not be broadcast, because not correctly readable. It is therefore impossible to have one single pixel, simultaneously very different from its left and right neighbors.

Binary images

Faxes can be stored as binary or grey level images. The cutoff level between black and white (Default 128) can be adjusted. No information is lost until the image is saved, therefore this level can be freely modified until image end. The purpose of this option is to save disk space.

Displaying received files

Each time the end of an image is detected, an image file is created and its name appears on the file list of the reception window. By clicking on a file name, it is displayed in the transmit window.

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