Well, there it goes. Today, the 19th of August 2025, NOAA-15 was decommissioned over svalbard. I didn’t manage to get the final APT, but this time meti from the satdump discord (and some others) did, and is the picture attached to this post.
Here is a link to their archive website licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0 received by meti.
Earlier, (the svalbard pass before?) the AVHRR patch cooling was disabled, making the IR channels unusable and white on the APT.
With NOAA-18 and NOAA-19 having been decommissioned earlier, as I have made posts about. This is the end of 137MHz APT, but meteor LRPT is still active, and is planned to continue for many years.
Although old, I found APT fun to receive, with it’s rhythmic clicking, and analogue images. If anyone is even in this community maybe post your best APT receptions in the comments.
I was never particularly good at it, but I really enjoyed it. I have fond memories of carrying an antenna around the room trying to chase down the strongest bit of signal, not to a great amount of success.
So long APT, I will miss your song!
There is always LRPT to try!
My last good APT from NOAA-15 today
A particularly nice one, (I think) 2024-05-01
The 2023 scan motor malfunction 2023-10-12
And some HIRS from the DSB 2023-09-29
I just came back to check on satellite status after a few months as I haven’t played around with it for a while.
What the hell has happened… I was just expecting to maybe see NOAA-15 scan motor issue as usual, not the entire fleet to be dead :(
It’s also completely unnecessary, NOAA-19 was fine until they did “End Of Life testing”, with NOAA-18 the failed RX could have been an issue, but NOAA-15 was mostly fine other than the Scan motor getting stuck (and always fixing itself). It’s now very likely all 3 will explode due to a battery failure that happened on NOAA-16 and NOAA-17. because of the shut down.
So not only is this a waste of good weather satellite that provide a useful service (APT is actually used in remote location), it’s also dangerous to satellites due to the space debris that will be created.
