sstv and how i receive it

a demonstration of how i receive

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)


this is the source image (heh, it happens to blend in well with the background), this is what it should look like when decoded

well, i'll show you some of the SSTV images i received :p