[gsoc18-a-dd6] DirectDemod: Decoding of Automatic Picture Transmission (NOAA)

One of the important functions of satellites is to provide us with weather data allowing us to properly plan and be prepared for adverse weather conditions. Major users of such data are fishermen or sailors. They need to know the positions of dangerous storms, hurricanes etc and allow them to move away from them. Generally, the weather images can be downloaded from the internet, but the ships rarely have an internet connection. Hence for this, one of the solutions is that NOAA weather satellites freely send the weather images and data down to earth continuously. This is perfect for us, the users can simply have a simple and cheap RTL-SDR device and capture this freely available weather data. Currently, this is possible, but there are no opensource tools that come with the complete package. Usually, one software is used to capture and demodulate FM and then the decoded audio is fed into the other software to decode the image. This complex procedure needs a human's manual input and the raw IQ file may be lost in the process. This project intends to solve this. The open source tool that will be developed will have all the required functionalities.