Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
The ISS has been transmitting images using SSTV on 2m Amateur Radio for the last couple of days. Here’s a couple of my decodes from yesterday (10/7/20)
1959PST 10/7/20:
1822PST 10/7/20 – this was a low angle pass, so surprised I could receive any from this pass:
This was my second time joining the weekly River City ARCS SSTV net and it had been a few weeks since the first time, so I had to go back and work out how I setup MMSSTV again. Since MMSSTV is a Windows app, on my Mac I booted WIndows 10 in Parallels and ran it from there. Unfortunately the combination of MMSSTV’s flaky soundcard settings and sharing a USB soundcard device with Windows in a Virtual Machine is probably not the best combination, but for future reference here’s the steps I used that finally worked:
The above steps seemed to work fine. Plugging in the Rigblaster after booting Windows 10 and then assigning it to the Windows 10 running VM when prompted by Parallels didn’t seem to work for me (although probably makes more sense), despite seeing the Rigblaster showup in the MMSSTV soundcard settings. No idea why this didn’t work.
Here’s a selection of the pictures received on the net this week:
Between each of these I was trying different settings and trying to get the Rigblaster selected in MMSSTV. By the time of the last couple of pictures sent on the net, I’d got the setting setup just right.
The River City Amateur Radio SSTV net is held weekly at 9pm, on the clubs 440Mhz repeater (which has coverage of Sacramento, CA and surrounding area). Details are on the club website here.
The River City Amateur Radio Communications Society in Sacramento runs a weekly SSTV net Wednesdays at 9pm local time (following the 2m net on the 2m N6NA repeater, and the 10m net) – I’ve tried to receive the pictures before but on 2m simplex between most of the stations in Sacramento area and out to my QTH in Davis, it’s a bit far to get a good copy, and some of the stations I can’t copy at all.
This week we tried something different and ran the net on the club’s 440MHz repeater. This worked great for me as we’ve got great coverage from this repeater over Sacramento area and surrounding area.
This was my first time to actively check-in on the net so I had a few things to learn on the fly! First, Multiscan 3B, what seems like one of the most common SSTV apps for the Mac, doesn’t seem to run reliably on current OS X 10.12.x versions. Last time I tried to use it I didn’t have any issue, but with the most recent MacOS version it would only start up the first time after it was installed, and every other time it crashed.
The first couple of pictures I received I realized I was receiving through the built in mic, and wasn’t even receiving via my Rigblaster interface. Understandably these first few pics were pretty terrible:
Part way through the net I switched to installing MMSSTV on Windows 10 running under Parallels on my Mac. My connection to my radio is through a Rigblaster, so I had to attach the Rigblaster input and output USB device to my Windows 10 guest. Once I configured it to receive and send through my Rigblaster interface, now I was receiving great images from the other ops on the net, and managed to send and get good reports on a couple of pictures myself:
Now I’ve got my config setup, I’m looking forward to our next SSTV net!