Last night we had some tremendous storms move through the San Antonio TX area. Downpours and 3 tornados. Despite the heavy weather, my Outernet system sitting inside a South facing window maintained 4.6 SNR throughout. I expected to see some outage but all was good.
that’s really good my outernet my antenna has to be out side of my window to work so i make up a mount with some help from my father since he is a engineer and deals with rf with radios alot.
I’m still trying to figure out why the SNR fluctuates so much, independent of weather.
20dB!
I also see the SNR fluctuates and its worse during some times of the day some times its fluctuates from +4dB to -0.81dB.
After many years of experience with the GOES Weather satellite down links on 1.691 GHz I have not seen rain fade as a problem. Even with very heavy thunderstorm downpours I have only detected 1 or 2 dB of additional loss. It’s good to hear the theory holds at 1.54 GHz with wide beam width antennas.
Rich @ wc8j
As soon as I can get an implementation of Skylark up and running I’ll see if I can log RSSI and SNR from the RTL-SDR VERSUS a measured received power level with a lab instrument independent of the RTL-SDR. I strongly suspect that the RTL-SDR RSSI indicator is very arbitrary and not a good indication of the real received power and signal to noise ratio. It might be a while since NTC CHIP modules are stuck in the way back machine…
– Rich @ wc8j
If you PM me I can make some magic happen.
On a clear day I average 7 db. On a cloudy day I get 4.5-5. During a storm(right now) I struggle to get 3db. Have you ever seen a thunder storm with snow?