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North American Shortwave Pirate / Re: WTCR 6925u
« on: July 11, 2010, 0201 UTC »
Good signal tonight - S4 to S6 consistently with little in the way of deep fades into Texas.
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7/11/10
6925 USB
0050z: Just now catching distinctive loon calls and Northwoods Radio "Broadcasting freedom from the Great Lakes" YL voice ID.
6925u 7/10/10 11:54 sio555, fantastic signal, female folk vocalist sort, followed by a brief statement something about "a new world order", and into rap music, anti-Iraq war screed
Over the years, I have used several different programs for SSTV reception of both amateur and pirate material, and MMSSTV remains my favorite. It may not be as polished as some of the others, but it's robust, flexible, and quite functional.QuoteLex, what program do you use to copy SSTV off the air?
MMSSTV, one of the world's great freebie programs. Should be available from several sites.
Thanks Lex, I'm going to give that a try ...
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The "quick and easy" way to hook it up is, as mentioned above, to place your computer's microphone next to your receiver's speaker. It will pick up the squawks and warbles and magically turn them into images. It will also pick up other noises in the room, and be subject to some of the oddities of going through an acoustic link, but it's a perfectly usable method, and one that we used to get many people on the air with SSTV back when I was in Florida.
Another method also mentioned above is the direct audio line, though also as mentioned, you may need to choke out some noise with ferrite beads or toroids.
The method I prefer is to use a 1:1 transformer in the line, to isolate the radio and the computer from being directly connected to each other. This also lets me throw an attenuator into the mix so I can adjust the levels easily with a knob instead of having to mess with onscreen volume controls all the time. I also have another isolation transformer going the other way, from the computer to the radio for sending SSTV on the ham bands. This is part of the interface that I made, which also has an outgoing attenuator (again, no fiddly onscreen controls), manual/off/auto TX switch (using the computer's serial port to kick the radio into TX mode), and a level meter to avoid splatter.
That's a whole hellofalot more than the basics required to work SSTV though. For the isolation cable approach, all you really need is an audio cable with a 1:1 transformer in it (you can use other values too if 1:1 isn't available - I've seen people use all sorts of wacky values and work fine - it just needs to be an audio transformer).
Then again, for full transmit-receive capability, a mic and speakers work just fine - just hold the one up to the other, depending on which direction you're going, and the sound goes through.
Wolverine Radio 7/10/10 10:45 sio545, fading and some static crashes, "Heat Wave", "Love to See the Rain in the Summertime", "Summertime Blues", "Suddenly Last Summer"
Wow! Degen 1103s.
And we trust an article in a "right-wing-Onion" newspaper... why?How is it, far left-wing and far right-wing always end up as dictators (communists and fascists)?
Peace!
No war needed, or requested.
For the record, I'm the guy who builds commercial AM, FM, TV, and SW antennas. I build baluns to handle 500 KW continuous duty. I know a thing or two about baluns too.
73.