poniedziałek, 11 maja 2020

My first SSTV QSO

Many many years ago I was living in small town in Poland (Deblin). There were no amateur radio enthusiasts there so all my knowledge about this hobby I was finding in books and newspaper (for younger readers - no, there was no internet, youtube and wikipedia in that time).
I was subscribing a magazine related to amateur radio - "Radioelektronik".



One day I found an article "Odbiorczy przemiennik SSTV" (something like "Device for receiving SSTV". That was the first time, when I heard about SSTV mode. In that time transmitting pictures over radio sounded like supreman technology :)



Of course I started planning to build the device but I was on the level of single transistor receivers and the device built on nearly 40 IC(s) was far above my capabilities. In that time even finding all the necessary parts would be miracle...

But SSTV was always somewhere in my mind and I always planned that some day...
This some day is actually today :)

Some time ago I started to dig into youtube videos and articles related to SSTV. Finally some day there was a test of sending SSTV picture from laptop to mobile phone (over the sound only, no radio).





In old times there was one standard - the pictures were B/W and sending the picture took 8 seconds. Now there are various standards (not sure how to decide which should be used).




Plan for today was rather different - make some CW QSO from the mobile radio shack.



But conditions were ugly and managed only a few contacts - so decided to make a quick try...
Using the IC-7300 connected to laptop I tried to call some station using MMSSTV.

And finally ...tadaaaammmm:










That was my very first QSO on SSTV!! Some say that 34 years after the initial plan. Better late than not at all :)

Unfortunately I had only prepared a picture with his/mine callsign and second with just "73".

So dear Michael (EA1IYK), sorry that our QSO was rather short but I will send you my QSL and many thanks for that nice QSO and next time I will try to be better prepared :) 73!!

I was using the templates available in MMSSTV and only pictures I found somewhere in my PC.
Now working on extending these templates.




So see you some day on SSTV :)