Listening to weather satellites and airplanes pass overhead from a backyard in Hungary.
Dr. Emma Kun. Astrophysicist by day, amateur radio listener by hobby. This page documents my adventures with a low-cost RTL-SDR dongle, an LNA, and dipole antennas, chasing the signals of polar-orbiting weather satellites and decoding the imagery they beam down as they sweep across the sky. I also enjoy to listen to airplanes.
The kit I currently use to receive and decode satellite transmissions. I also have a Raspberry Pi 5 for continuous observation. I use the following softwares: SatDump for satellites, SDR++ for satellites and radio stations, Dump1090 for airplane tracking.
Images from one of my observations of the signal transmitted by the METEOR M2-3 (NORAD ID: 57166) amateur radio satellite, captured on 31 May 2026 from Abádszalók, Hungary. There's a very nice description of how to do this in Jacopo's Lair. Good antenna orientation is a key to success.
Features picked out from the imagery as the satellite tracked from northern Russia down across Anatolia.
I track aircrafts by receiving their ADS-B broadcasts on 1090 MHz using an RTL-SDR Blog V4 dongle, an LNA, and a small dipole antenna in my window. My Mac decodes the signals with dump1090-fa (which I built from source) and plots them on a live SkyAware map. From a flat, open spot in rural Hungary I am reaching aircraft up to about 200+ km away, each shown with its callsign, altitude, speed, and real-time position. My plan is to do this continuously with my Raspberry Pi 5.
You can find the policy here ↗
Email: kun dot emma0608 at gmail dot com
