So last night I thought I would try and decode some weather fax of all the “goings on” out east. Here’s a quick run down of how I did it.
First get the NWS Broadcast schedule. I found it here: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/marine/rfax.pdf. This is a great document that lists WEFAX stations and their schedules worldwide. I’ve also decoded transmissions from the Louisiana site in the past.
Fire up your decoding software. For this I used MultiPSK because it was the first thing I thought of and I was slightly familiar with it. There are other softwares that will do this JVComm32 and SeaTTY being two. Try to make sure you have this already to go before hand!
Once you’ve got the station tuned in and they begin transmitting the first thing that comes down will be a solid line. You’ll need to use your software to shift the image left or right. Ideally the solid line should be shifted all the way left or right. you can see in the first few images that I made some shifts mid transmission.
As the images come down you’ll notice that they shift on there own slightly. MultiPSK has a slant adjustment feature to correct this but it seems to only be available in the paid version. That’s the how scroll, down to see the what.
-KD0JLN
Cool!