Even though this was a good pass of the QMR-KWT-2 (RS95S) #satellite for me, the image transmissions just happened to line up when the view to the satellite was either obstructed, or it was too high in the sky for my antennas that are at a fixed 15 degree elevation angle. It hears nothing when a satellite gets above 45-50 degree elevation. I was only able to capture partial #SSTV images. I hope others have better luck.

#Hamradio #AmateurRadio

Made my first #sstv contact! Man you have to be patient, but when it comes it its very exciting.

#amateurradio #hamradio

Had a silly thought with SSTV just now, thinking abut the whole issue with AltText.

There are two SSTV bots that I know of, operating here on the fediverse. @aregsstv and @vk4msl_sstv.

One provides a generic "static" alt text, the other provides none at all. Both for the same reason: the medium doesn't provide such a facility because the mode is inherently visual, sometimes the image doesn't even make it clearly across the ionosphere.

I wonder how practical it'd be to encode/decode a PSK31 carrier just adjacent to the SSTV signal. Typical SSTV bandwidth occupies ~500Hz to ~2500Hz.

The challenge being a SSB signal is normally not that wide, which is why I'd have to use a slow mode like PSK31 and not something faster. The PSK31 signal seems to occupy about ~200Hz of bandwidth. There looks like on sufficiently wide SSB tranceivers, we could squeeze something in at ~2750Hz, assuming it doesn't confuse the SSTV decoder.

The length would not be long. Alt text for short modes like the Robot modes (7~36 seconds) would be all but impossible. The plot here is a Scottie S1 signal, transmission time about 2 minutes (https://vk4msl-bm.local/sstv/rx/2026-02-08T05-09Z-S1-VK4CAU.png).

2 minutes of PSK31 would get you maybe 400~500 characters to describe the image. Not a lot, but better than nothing. We'd get about 200 with Scottie S2, and of course Pasokon P7 would let you be quite verbose.

The challenge is how much the extra carrier would perturb the SSTV detector, particularly in wide receivers.

#SSTV #PSK31 #AmateurRadio #Accessibility #AltText

I'm coming to the conclusion that SSTV isn't for the faint hearted, nor is it for underpowered stations, and it's not a lot of fun on a contest weekend!

With 50 watts and a dipole I stand no chance against the contest stations who don't listen on a frequency before transmitting 😡
I'm not sure 50w and my dipole cut it anyway on 20m!

It's a fun experiment that I'm not giving up on just yet.

#AmateurRadio #SSTV

Storing Image Data As Analog Audio

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://hackaday.com/2026/02/12/storing-image-data-as-analog-audio/