[Ham-Mac] MacHRPT beta release

[Sergei Ludanov]

Hello,

It may  not be exactly ham radio application but it is somewhat related.
MacHRPT  allows to display level 1b HRPT datasets, generated by NOAA 
from raw data received from weather satellites. Those are high 
resolution files. To get the file you have to register with NOAA and 
submit the request for file. After request is submitted you will 
receive e-mail giving the information where to get ordered datasets. 
MacHRPT has built in download function. All you need to do is to select 
Download from file menu and copy in paste file name from NOAA e-mail 
(the name is in e-mail after the word get) and click download. File 
will be downloaded to your Pictures folder. Download is asynchronos and 
you can still do other things in MacHRPT while it's downloading file. 
After file is downloaded select Open from file menu, select downloaded 
file and click open. Displayed images can be processed, printed and 
saved as TIFF or PDF format with full or reduced resolution. Original 
level 1b files are big (about 60 MBytes) so application is memory 
"hungry". If you have less than 512 MB of RAM, it can be quite slow... 
I tested on 1GHz PowerBook with 512 MB of RAM and eMac with 384 MB of 
RAM. Performance is not too bad.
Anyway if you are into weather satellites imagery give it a try and let 
me know what do you think, what like and what not. Suggestions are 
always wellcome.

NOAA web site: http://www.saa.noaa.gov

MacHRPT can be downloaded from http://homepage.mac.com/kd6cji

It is free, but I can't guarantee that it is bug free :-), after all it 
is a first cut.

Sorry, no documentation yet, but you can always ask questions.

Thanks for reading and 73 de Sergei KD6CJI