Over the last days, more and more imagery has been received, with the NOAA satellites on their appointed rounds. A few things were found that might help you to get things working better:

(1) A high sample rate of the SDR (like 3.2 MSPS) is neither necessary, nor advantageous, in fact, I discovered this to be the main reason for some interrupted frames – the data is flowing via USB at 3.2 MSPS, but not all the time. Also, the S/N seems to be better, at lower sample rates, like 0.9 MSPS.

(2) The bandwidth. Provided that it is heated-up and left running, the little crystal in the SDR USB stick is actually pretty stable. I need to use a correction value of about 17 kHz at the 137 MHz frequency, but once entered, no need to change so far. Once the frequency is corrected, there is no need to set the FM bandwidth any wider than it needs to be, about 38 kHz seems to do the trick.

(3) Volume control. Easy to set, about 70% on the WXtoIMG works fine – I didn’t look at this too carefully at the start – make sure to re-adjust the volume after coming back from other tasks with the SDR USB stick.

NOAA-19 (2014-08-27)

NOAA-15 (2014-08-27)

Not quite perfect, but I can see improvement!