Pirates and Slow Scan TV

Status
Not open for further replies.

ka3jjz

Wiki Admin Emeritus
Joined
Jul 22, 2002
Messages
25,354
Location
Bowie, Md.
Pirates such as Wolverine Radio have been known to send Slow Scan TV (SSTV) pictures during or just after their broadcasts. This mode is normally used exclusively by hams

A good solid signal is needed to get good copy - any noise on the signal, and the picture will be degraded. Here are some links to get you started.

Slow-scan television - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What is SSTV?

MMSSTV - MM HamSoft

MM-SSTV Freeware for Windows machines - there are several explanatory articles at the bottom. Very popular and well recognized software

MultiMode - CW RTTY SSTV FAX MORSE PSK31 ACARS SITOR AMTOR ALE DTMF FFT ASCII Decoding Software for the Macintosh

MultiMode (for MACs - unfortunately not freeware) also copies this mode.

Mike
 

kb2vxa

Completely Banned for the Greater Good
Banned
Joined
Mar 22, 2005
Messages
6,100
Location
Point Pleasant Beach, N.J.
Pardon the giggles but some of the pirates on the low end of 40M ARE hams. Older transmitters can go somewhat out of band with no modification making it easy, same with a 40M ham antenna and a tuner. Comments back and forth when not broadcasting tells you they're not broadcasting blind. BTW, capturing an SSTV image ID is as good as a QSL card short circuiting their mail drop system.
 

Darth_vader

Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2013
Messages
327
<hijack> MMSSTV's a good programme and has served me well over the years. That and its sister project MMTTY.

Eons ago, a friend of mine and I used it to operate a short-lived slow-scan dialup "service" with it on my then newly-vacated second line. (It's been way too long, so don't bother asking how we did it as I probably won't remember.) I *do* remember we'd use it to encode the "picture of the day" to a WAV file, then another programme would be used to automatically play it back over the wave modem of my old dedicated 486DX4 when somebody would call in.

Those were the days... </hijack>
 

SCPD

QRT
Joined
Feb 24, 2001
Messages
0
Location
Virginia
First of all it was a DX2 (my old Packard Bell that I gave him after I had built a then-cutting edge 200 MHz Pentium II machine), DX4s were pretty hard to come by and hardly anybody had them as I recall. It used the autoattendant function in Phonemaster (old DOS program). The ISA modem had a modular line-in that in turn was fed from the line-out on the sound blaster, this is how you could pump audio out to the phone line. Basically phone rings, modem answers, plays a recording then can either go to voice mail, a menu or just hang up. I have a friend who has some old Fidelipac cart decks and one of these days I want to get hold of a couple then build an answering device, interfaced to a cart player, to do the same thing. I don't know how well that would work on an ESS line though.

Our "SSTV" service was actually a joke line that used radiofax (basically the same configuration as the NOAA weather chart broadcasts on shortwave). We did it in a "weekly magazine" format of usually 2 or 3 pages full of geek humor (some of it naughty). Darth would do the paste-up and layout (yes, on paper!) and I would do the scanning and audio encoding on my PII. Originally it used wefax but toward the end I briefly experimented with one of the higher resolution SSTV formats which, among other things, supported color. The proprietary power supply unit in the PackBell eventually took a $#it (caught fire) and that was the end of that.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top