LRPT 🛰️

My personal archive of METEOR-M2 LRPT satellite passes received from Wayne County, Michigan.

Captured 2026-05-17. Satellite: METEOR-M2-3, 78° max elevation. Best pass to date

About LRPT

LRPT - Low Rate Picture Transmission

Beginner's guide (great resource)

My Setup

• Receiver: RTL-SDR Blog V4
• Antenna: V-dipole, backyard deployment
• Software: SatDump, gpredict
• Frequency: 137.9 MHz
• Typical gain: 40 dB (low elevation passes: 44 - 48 dB)

SatDump software shown during peak elevation (78°), capturing LRPT on 137.9 MHz. Decoder pipeline at bottom indicates synced status.

Repository Structure

data/
  2026-05-09_20-06_meteor_m2-x_lrpt_137.9 MHz/
    dataset.json                      # Satellite name, timestamp, metadata
    telemetry.json                    # Satellite housekeeping (channel modes, instrument status)
    MSU-MR/
      msu_mr_rgb_MSA_corrected.png    # Best composite image
      MSU-MR-1.png                    # Channel 1 (visible)
      MSU-MR-2.png                    # Channel 2 (visible)
      MSU-MR-3.png                    # Channel 3 (near-infrared)
pull-data.sh                          # Copies key files from SatDump live_output into data/
blackrow-analysis.py                  # Identifies black row clusters in an image and maps them to elapsed pass time

Scripts

pull-data.sh

Copies the key files from a SatDump output directory into data/. Skips passes that already exist — will not overwrite existing passes.

./pull-data.sh ~/Documents/live_output

blackrow-analysis.py

Scans a decoded image for black row clusters and reports their position in elapsed time from AOS. Useful for correlating dropout artifacts with pass elevation and diagnosing causes (multipath nulls, low SNR segments, deframer hiccups).

python3 blackrow-analysis.py data/2026-05-09_20-06_meteor_m2-x_lrpt_137.9\ MHz/MSU-MR/msu_mr_rgb_MSA_corrected.png

Pass Log (incomplete)

Date	Satellite	Max El	Direction	Peak SNR	Notes
2026-05-17	METEOR-M2-3	78.53	Southbound	17.025	New v2 V-dipole antenna, at a park with more horizon. Basically a perfect pass
2026-05-11	METEOR-M2-4	11.8°	Northbound	7.47	First with DIY V-dipole antenna. Surprisingly decent for 11.8 elevation
2026-05-11	METEOR-M2-4	87.44°	Northbound	16.364	Best one to date. Near-perfect elevation
2026-05-11	METEOR-M2-3	47.51°		—	Average
2026-05-09	METEOR-M2-4	38°	Northbound	13.4 dB	-
2026-05-02	METEOR-M2-4	78°	—	—	First great image