January 23, 2019

HF Weather Fax

I saw a post on reddit about WEFAX so I looked into it. National Weather Service broadcasts weather related WEFAX images and text in various different HF frequencies from different stations around the world, pretty much constantly. Using fldigi, I was able to decode the signal from Boston and New Orleans and get a few different images. You need to tune about 1.5kHz below the list frequency using USB. Fldigi has some adjustments on the bottom for adjusting the angle and position of the image. It’s mostly related to maritime weather. Over a year in the hobby and I keep discovering cool new things to do in radio.

Most of these are from 9.110 MHz

This one from the New Orleans station didn’t come out as clearly. It took almost 20 minutes for this page. This one was on 4.3179MHz.

Here’s the PDF with the list of frequencies. I used my 80m OCF Dipole, I’mg going to try again during the day with the hexbeam and see how that does. I’m told they give a nice QSL so I sent a print out of one of the images to the Coast Guard station that runs the broadcast.

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