How I became involved in

Remote Imaging

THE VERY EARLY YEARS
 

To tell you the truth it really all began when I was a kid. I had a job as a paper boy and an interest in astronomy.

Getting up at 05:30 every morning used to give me a good view of the skies and in those days the street lights were switched off after about midnight to save power.

I would get my bike from the garden shed and stare up at the bright morning stars and wonder about being alive, the meaning of life and everything else. (heavy stuff for a paper boy)

As time went by I discovered that the pay for the paper round was getting less and less per paper, and the daily delivery was almost too much for me to carry. I looked around and found a job at the local Pharmacy where I made tea, delivered medicines and cleaned the floor after school. It meant I could stay in bed longer and I earned more money as well.

The Pharmacist had a sense of humour, but was a knowledgeable man and I decided to show him the astronomy project I was preparing for the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. He took the "mickey" out of me, of course, but after explanations as to his amusement at my presentation declared that he knew a man who had actually made an astronomical telescope.

Now that was something. I had saved some money of my own and bought a 25x30 Japanese terrestrial telescope and was proud of that, but a real astronomical telescope was another matter.

The day came when the man involved eventually came into the shop for some medicine. He was a school teacher at a local school (my heart sank with grief, my street cred was doomed) the introduction was soon over and I was duely invited to visit his home on the next clear evening.

I arrived at the address, only half a mile from my home and parked my bike in the drive. I did not suffer the indignity of having to ring the front door bell as my new tutor was already preparing for a view of the seven day old setting Moon. In due course I got my invitation to examine the eyepiece of the 6" Newtonian reflector and to my amazement the first "real" view of the Moon in all it's glory affected me in a way that I can only say was to have lasting consequences throughout my life. I was stunned by the brilliant sharp definition of the craters, I had seen nothing like it through my own poor excuse for a telescope. This was a turning point in my life. Soon preparations were made for me to construct my first home made telescope, using ex-government lenses and cardboard tubes. Having driven my mum and dad nuts by taking over the dining room for a week, I had followed the instructions to the letter, calculating the focal lengths of the lenses, spacing them with cardboard rings, using aluminium medicine tubes for the eyepieces. I made my first astro-refractor with ramsden eyepiece for less than a quarter of the price of the previous shop bought item and with superior quality images.

MY FIRST STEPS IN INDUSTRY
I left school about two years later and began an engineering apprenticeship, with one day at college every week preparing for examinations and devloping skills of my own. During my years as an apprentice I built my own 150mm Newtonian telescope, with an equatorial mount and geared motor drive. I met others interested in astronomy and one friend who worked in a photographic processors taught me the basics of developing and printing my own films. I made threaded adaptors and progressed from quarter-plate glass negatives to 35mm SLR images in the space of a couple of years. I soon produced images of the Moon and Saturn that were as good as some of the top amateurs in the country. Then came the onset of the Sodium Street Lamp, those "funny orange lights" as they were called at the time, everything seemed a strange colour and I would almost walk past people I new, as if they were strangers in this mysterious hue. These then had been the most important years of my life as far as astronomy went....... but things were about to change !

The teacher, Harold Skane and his wife Margaret, are still two of my dearest friends and it is to them that I owe much of my enthusiasm for the hobbies I now pursue.

LIGHT POLLUTION
Soon came the introduction of all-night lighting, a precaution against night crime and burglary, this was the end of astronomy as I had known it and to this day I have never really returned to those good old days of night viewing. Only on rare occassions did I get deeply involved in astronomy, these were few and far between. One was a night trip to an observatory on the Mendip Hills where an 18" Newtonian Reflector is still in use and I was able to see M13 in all it's glory as well as the Ring Nebula in the Lyre. Other occassions include various comets, the most significant being Halley's ( I had the mirror re-aluminised specially) and more recently Hale-Boppe a wonderful sight in the western sky after dusk.
MARRIAGE THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING ELSE
I have never lost my interest for astronomy, nor have I persued it as I perhaps would have liked. Having married and assumed the responsibility of fatherhood for two sons, inspires one to thoughts of more important issues, such as new shoes and trousers for the next school term!

During the interim period of hard labour, ensuring the kids were fed and watered left me little time for astronomy and my ideas were aimed in other directions. I had a neighbour who was hell bent on collecting helicopter bits, he convinced me it was a good idea to put together a collection of helicopters and call it The International Helicopter Museum, so I became a founder member and Vice Chairman, for eighteen years all I could see were rotor blades. The Museum is now well established and is the largest collection of helicopters in the world, based at Weston-super-Mare airfield is now self sustaining and making sufficient funds to erect it's third new hangar for the aircraft display. I decided to leave the museum when I changed my employment five years ago. I now travel 500 miles to and from work each week and that leaves little enough time for my family and friends, to devote the attention the museum deserves.

FIRST SOUNDS FROM SPACE
The interest I had in aircraft, encouraged me to listen to radio communications between pilots and their ground control, this in turn led to the purchase of an up-to-date hand-held scanner for easier listening. One always has to make full use of new toys so I tweeked and searched and soon found the satellite frequencies and the strange bleeps that came between 137-138Mhz.

Having had first site of weather images at a local school, I was interested in the means by which these images could be "collected." I tried various sources to find information on the means to acquire the data and the most informative was the UK's Remote Imaging Group. The quarterly journal contains a wealth of information (albeit a little technical if one is not an electronics buff) but for those who are not technical there is also sufficient information and part-made or totally made projects to get started

MY LATEST PROJECT
As you may have seen from my weather pages, I have constructed enough equipment to gather images from NOAA and Meteor satellites together with HF weather charts and my most recent project has been to set up a sat-dish for the Meteosat 6 geostationary satellite, situated at 0 degrees longtitude i.e. due south of London UK. This source transmits on about 1700 Mhz so special equipment is needed to acquire the data. All this equipment is available for the amateur at reasonable cost, with information available from RIG. (See the Link page for access to RIG) The high resolution primary images (PDUS) are transmitted four times a day unencrypted for amatuer use and there are cross links with other satellites such as GMS, GOMS & GOES 8 which are re-transmitted. APT Wefax images are transmitted approximately at four minute intervals and cover most of the globe viewed from the Greenwich meridian plus APT images re-transmitted from the other satellites mentioned.

27 September 1997 - The project is now complete. The downconvertor, which receives the signal from Meteosat via the dish, at 1691Mhz & 1694.5Mhz converts it to 137.5Mhz via two channel switching for decoding through the existing APT system used for the NOAA and Meteor satellites.
 

NB. A 1 Meter dish is adequate for the reception of wefax images from Meteosat. A larger dish is not a necessity.

WHAT OF THE FUTURE ?
I see remote weather imaging as astronomy in reverse, if it is difficult to look out through our atmosphere, then why not look back at the Earth, one of the most beautiful jewels in the universe. With technology advancing as it is we amateurs may be setting up systems to download live images from equipment like the Hubble Space Telescope in a few years. I have already linked to the Bradford (UK) Remote Operated Telescope. Perhaps I will be able to continue where I left off 30 years ago, only now I won't have to suffer freezing cold hands and feet, nor the dew on the eyepiece!
The team, with me.
Without their patience this would not be possible
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