ISS SSTV October 2026

It's ISS SSTV time again. This event runs from 09:00 UTC on October 2nd to 15:55 UTC on October 6th. It was a bit of a struggle getting set up for this due to building work but with everything turned on nothing worked! The TS2000X is now attached to a Windows 11 PC and I am still sorting things out. SATPC32 would not play ball. I tried GPredict with similar issues - not the fault of the software, just me being in a rush because I had actually forgotten about the SSTV event.

I then downoaded SkyRoof. I did look at this a while ago but never got any further. With the Hamlib package loaded it surprised me by tuning the TS2000X with no fuss at all. The package is designed to work with an SDR and I will investigate that later but for now it was ideal. But...

...no audio. Ok, so the audio comes out of the radio (of course!) but wasn't ending up anywhere useful. I run three systems all interconnected by a mixer and splitter. The plan was to run qsstv on the Linux box and use SkyRoof to do the doppler stuff. It turned out that when I was tidying everything up I had inadvertently connected the PC input to one of the mixer input channels instead of a splitter output channel. Useful.

With the cable in the right place things then worked but I missed that ISS pass. But at least I was ready for the next one.

Oh yes and I was rather surprised when SkyRoof talked to me! It announces when satellites are coming into view.

The first image was at 14:39 on the 2nd and turned out as a good clean copy.

The next was 14:41 on the same pass. Not too bad apart from a couple of drop-outs.

This next one was from 16:14. There is more noise present but still pretty clean.

The last image was 17:52 and was rather surprising as the ISS was only around 5 degrees above the horizon. There was one more in that pass but only a partial decode and at 3 degrees.

I will update this page as the event progresses assuming there are better or different images.