Monday, February 23, 2009

More SSTV



Just a few more images I have received at the QTH. These are all from the last week. Like Jeff commented on the net, it is amazing how vivid these images can be over HF. Most of these signals are no more than S5. The Star Trek images are from a QSO with Jean, VE2JCW who is NW of Montreal, Canada. What can I say but lots of fun!!



73,

James
KCØTQD

Sunday, February 15, 2009

SSTV on HF

Well, after finally getting around to setting up a PSK station and really having a lot of fun with that, it occurred to me that all I needed to do for SSTV was to load the software. So I did. In a matter of minutes, I was getting some really cool pictures from all over the place on 14.230 MHz. As a matter of fact, the first picture I received after loading MMSSTV (great software as far as I, the beginner, am concerned)was from EA2JO in Spain. Following are the images I received for the next few minutes.


Pretty cool, those are two of the better images from the exchange. Following are a few more that I was able to receive.
For those that haven't seen the movie "The Dark Knight", the last image is from that movie. You never know what you will see come across. I have ended up in the past 24 hours receiving about 30 images on 20 Meters SSB.

For anyone that would like to give SSTV a shot, there are a few good sites to check out.
First of all, www.AC6V.com is a great reference for ham radio in general, and if you haven't tried it I highly recommend it. The MMSSTV software is available for free from JE3HHT's website. Also I have found additional info at Hamuniverse - Intro to Slow Scan TV. The Hamuniverse site has some good info on how to play with SSTV without even using a standard interface; although I would recommend at the very least a cable with 1/8" headphone jacks on each end to plug into the external speaker port on the radio and on the line-in on your computer.

Have fun!!

73,

James
KCØTQD