this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Amateur Satellites

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Discussion about amateur reception and processing of data from artificial satellites, primarily through radio signals but data from internet resources is welcome too.

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Well, there it goes. Today, the 19th of August 2025, NOAA-15 was decommissioned over svalbard. I didn't manage to get the final APT, but this time meti from the satdump discord (and some others) did, and is the picture attached to this post.
Here is a link to their archive website licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0 received by meti.

Earlier, (the svalbard pass before?) the AVHRR patch cooling was disabled, making the IR channels unusable and white on the APT.

With NOAA-18 and NOAA-19 having been decommissioned earlier, as I have made posts about. This is the end of 137MHz APT, but meteor LRPT is still active, and is planned to continue for many years.

Although old, I found APT fun to receive, with it's rhythmic clicking, and analogue images. If anyone is even in this community maybe post your best APT receptions in the comments.

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[โ€“] user224 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I just came back to check on satellite status after a few months as I haven't played around with it for a while.

What the hell has happened... I was just expecting to maybe see NOAA-15 scan motor issue as usual, not the entire fleet to be dead :(

[โ€“] thomasdouwes@sopuli.xyz 2 points 8 months ago

It's also completely unnecessary, NOAA-19 was fine until they did "End Of Life testing", with NOAA-18 the failed RX could have been an issue, but NOAA-15 was mostly fine other than the Scan motor getting stuck (and always fixing itself). It's now very likely all 3 will explode due to a battery failure that happened on NOAA-16 and NOAA-17. because of the shut down.
So not only is this a waste of good weather satellite that provide a useful service (APT is actually used in remote location), it's also dangerous to satellites due to the space debris that will be created.