Up until the 19th August 2025 amateurs were able to receive APT signals from the NOAA Weather satellites NOAA 15, 18 & 19
Shut Downs:
NOAA 15: 15:26:07UTC on the 19th August 2025 (APT transmission Turned Off). Reports have been submitted showing evidence of APT being still active on a couple of passes after this but on 137.5MHz and also HRPT being active but transmitting corrupted data. An Updated message from NOAA says the Satellite was successfully decommissioned at 20:37UTC so the first attempt did not complete successfully.
NOAA 19: 16:55UTC on the 13th August 2025. According to NOAA This was a week earlier then planned due to a battery failure which which occurred on the 9th Aug 2025 and required emergency decommissioning of the Satellite.
NOAA 18: 17:40UTC on the 6th June 2025. This was the first of the “Last 3 Remaining” NOAA POES weather satellites.
The Final Moments of NOAA 15.
NOAA 15 was the more troubled of the Last remaining satellites. For a number of years it has suffered moments of High Scan Motor Current Draw.
As Mentioned the Shutdown of NOAA 15 occurred at 15:26:07 on the 19th August 2025 and was recorded here at my QTH by my setup.
To view all the files for the information below click here. Included in these files are some hand tracked HRPT data that I had captured from an earlier date.
The Full Baseband Recording of this can be downloaded here and the recording from WXtoIMG can be downloaded here. Finally a TLE from the 19th August 2025 can be download here.
This Is a replay of the final pass at my QTH of the original shutdown pass. It was a low elevation pass to the North east of my station. As mentioned above there was some detected emissions at incorrect frequencies etc on the following couple of passes until 2037UTC.
Below is the SatDump output of the above pass.
My Last Recording of NOAA 19
NOAA 19 had and unexpected early shutdown because of a battery failure. Unfortunately this meant the lass pass was not in range of my receiving station so below is the last recoded pass I had of the satellite.
The Last pass at my QTH that was recorded was on the 10-08-2025 at 09:07UTC. To view all the files for the information below click here. Included in these files are some hand tracked HRPT data that I had captured from an earlier date.
The Full Baseband recording can be downloaded here and the WXtoIMG Recording here. A TLE for the 10th August 2025 can be downloaded here.
This the WXtoIMG Decode.
This is the SatDump Decode
NOAA 18
NOAA 18 was decommissioned on 6th June 2025 at 17:40 UTC. Unfortunately I was having setup issues during this time and so missed the final pass for this Satellite. The Last one I captured was on 5th June 2025 at 22:43UTC.
The WXtoIMG Recording can be downloaded here and the TLE for this pass can be downloaded here.
What’s Left
From this point I will continue to decode the Meteor Satellites and any future ones that are launched. I am also starting to explore moving to the 1.7GHz downlinks but this requires tracking antennas which I currently do not have.