sstv and how i receive it

demonstration of how i receive

a demonstration of how i receive

one of the images i received

one of the images i received,
not the one in the demo though

well, here's a small introduction to SSTV
sstv stands for slow-scan television, it's basically transmitting images in the form of audio (sstv signals) in radio frequencies. one would receive the audio in the radio frequency and decode it into the image that it's supposed to be, well, one could also just use sstv signals as a nice, cryptic way of communicating everywhere that has audio (it can also serve for stuff that doesn't have video and has only audio). my some-of-my-favorite-links page has some stuff on SSTV that are better than this explanation, and much more thorough!

i decode SSTV using Qsstv (pretty much the best SSTV program. it's linux-only though, so you'll have to look for alternatives if you use other platforms) and receive SSTV using WebSDR radios (due to me not having radio equipment yet). the WebSDR radios are http://g0xbuwebsdr.ddns.net:8901/ and http://websdr2.sdrutah.org:8902/index1a.html?tune=14230usb.

SSTV activities in these two take place at different times of the day (they're located very far away from each other), it seems--you could switch back and forth between them. i tune these radios to USB (upper sideband) mode, and 14.230 MHz (or 14230 kHz), it's pretty common for usage of SSTV! you can find very useful stuff regarding this topic in my some-of-my-favorite-links page.

right below is an SSTV signal i made using Qsstv, the SSTV mode is PD50 (shouldn't worry much about modes because at least most modern SSTV decoders automatically detect them, SSTV modes vary in error correction, resolution, color amount, etc. less of these three equals to a faster sstv transmission, more of these three equals to a slower sstv transmission, although, there may be other factors)

source image
this is the source image (heh, it happens to blend in well with the background), this is what it should look like when decoded
regarding transmitting, i have hastily created some at least quite decent templates for Qsstv, to reduce some things to a matter of one or two seconds (an older version of them can be downloaded here)

well, i'll show you some of the SSTV images i received :p
shown image 1shown image 2shown image 3shown image 4shown image 5shown image 6shown image 7shown image 8shown image 9shown image 10shown image 11shown image 12shown image 13shown image 14shown image 15shown image 16shown image 17shown image 18shown image 19shown image 20shown image 21shown image 22shown image 23shown image 24shown image 25shown image 26shown image 27shown image 28shown image 29shown image 30shown image 31shown image 32shown image 33shown image 34shown image 35shown image 36shown image 37shown image 38shown image 39shown image 40shown image 41shown image 42shown image 43shown image 44shown image 45shown image 46shown image 47shown image 48shown image 49shown image 50shown image 51shown image 52shown image 53shown image 54shown image 55shown image 56shown image 57shown image 58shown image 59shown image 60