Current setup
I haven’t got my HAM license yet, so I’m restricted to purely listening to HF, VHF and UHF, and Meshtastic of course. My current setup consists of a Diamond X50n VHF/UHF antenna for general listening, and a home-made QFH antenna tuned to 137 MHz for LRPT images from weather satellites. Then there are a RAK 5.8 dBi Lora antenna and an Allnet 10 dBi Yagi, both for 868 MHz Meshtastic.
The antennas are connected via LMR-240 coax to a box containing a Raspberry Pi 4, three RTL-SDR v4 and a home-made shield with two SX1262 Lora transceivers. All this is powered by a Waveshare 25W PoE splitter. A single ethernet cable goes down to the basement where my network switch is. I control everything with SDR++ server and Satdump.
If you want to learn how I made this, click here.
Since the picture above, I have created a version 0.2 of the shield correcting the mistakes I made in v0.1 and including a green LED.
The QFH antenna is shown below with a 137 MHz SAW filter with LNA from Aliexpress. Together with an RTL-SDR FM band-stop filter (not shown in the photo), I get great captures!
I use a mobile setup for HF, using an Airspy HF+ Discovery and YouLoop antenna. Nothing permanent on the roof (yet).
Software
On the Raspberry Pi 4, I run all my software in docker containers.
- For Meshtastic I’m relying on two meshtasticd containers, one for each antenna.
- For general listening using the VHF/UHF antenna, I’m running my own container with sdrpp as a server.
- For pulling LRPT images from weather satellites, I’ve built my own container with satdump. The satellite images are shared as a webpage using nginx.
If you want to learn more about the software stack I’m using, please read this post.
I have a Python script that check for the latest image very hour and uploads it to this website (MSA in daylight, MCIR during the night). This is the last one:
To do
- One RTL-SDR is still unused. My plan is to use this for ADS-B, but I still have to buy the filter and antenna.
- I have bought an automatically tracking satellite dish (the type typically used on top of a mobile home). I will install this to track weather satellites for their HRPT images on L-band.
Change History
16/10/2025: I have finally tested my v0.2 of the Meshtastic shield. Initially one of the two SX1262 modules wasn’t detected. I checked all the solder joints and found some broken connections. I used my solder station to fix them. These small solder points on the SX1262 modules are really hard to hand solder. I’ve just received my hot plate, so hopefully that will improve my soldering.
03/10/2025: In the meantime I have moved the two side-arms on the mast 180° of each other, to increase the distance between the QFH and Meshtastic antennas. This greatly improved the reception with the QFH! I am now also using the cheap SAW filter with LNA from Aliexpress (see below) again, together with the FM band-stop filter. I get great Meteor captures now!
17/09/2025: Again, I can’t get any captures from Meteor-M satellites using the SAW filter with LNA I mentioned below. I’ve swapped it for an RTL-SDR FM band-stop filter.
15/09/2025: I was getting relatively good LRPT captures with the QFH antenna without an LNA, but only with high satellite passes. Instead of the Nooelec LNA I have now added a cheap SAW filter with LNA from Aliexpress.
23/08/2025: I’ve removed the Nooelec LNA, as I get absolutely no results with the Meteor satellites. Much better results without it. Potentially this is because the rtl-sdr v4 can’t supply enough power. The Nooelec uses about 170 mA and the sdr supplies just 180 mA. i’ll investigate if I can power it with a battery and solar panel.
20/08/2025: I added my Nooelec SAWbird+ NOAA filter and LNA to the QFH antenna. I did this first in the box right before the RTL-SDR, but now I’ve moved it as close as possible to the antenna.
