Meteosat is a geostationary, earth observation satellite launched by ESA and now operated by Eumetsat. It provides weather
oriented imaging of the Earth's globe at both visible and infra-red wavelengths. Its field of view is restricted to that obtained
from its location 36000km above the intersection of the Equator and the Greenwich Meridian. From this vantage point, at
half-hourly intervals, it sends digitaly encoded, high resolution, infra-red and visible light images to its operational base station in
Germany. Here the raw images are processed, corrected, chopped into 800 by 800 pixel sections and annotated before being
disseminated via transponders onboard the spacecraft. A dissemination schedule is published by Eumetsat detailing what
pictures are transmitted at which times and on what channel, a Microsoft XL version is also available here, courtesy Eumetsat.
Images are relayed to the user community both digitally (now encrypted) and in the analogue WEFAX format on two FM
transmission frequencies: Channel A1 at 1691MHz and Channel A2 at 1694.5MHz. Our ground station receives, decodes and
stores these wefax images, then makes them available to the Internet community.