Radio and rails...

A combination of things finally came together. I’ve never played with digital SSTV before, plus I had some time to fiddle about and wanted to see if I could decode some of the digital stuff from QO100. Finally, I received a couple of nice digital pictures of the Dakar rally from F6HA, neatly incorporating my previous main love of motorsport! My setup is far from perfect (read, a series of accidentally cobbled together bits): Windows 10 laptop running the excellent SDR Console and connected to my QO100 transceiver via Ethernet, audio mixer feeding from the laptop and to the Linux PC, and QSSTV on the Linux PC. There is a lot of noise in my QO100 setup that I need to figure out because it really messes up analogue SSTV and seems to have made these digital modes even more fiddly. This is probably not helped by the audio running round the shack. In an ideal world I’d have a decent Windows PC with two screens and a virtual cable. That needs to wait until we sort out what is to happen with an older PC desktop here as if it is to be replaced I will nab it and…

Two good captures early this morning, again on the FTM100DE and its co-linear. These are pictures 12 (received at 04:30 UTC) and 1 (04:47 UTC) of the series: There was another pass just now and I wanted to try the FT450D plus its 144/28 transverter and loft mounted horizontal dipole. A bit disappointing but the pass was a lot further south and the pic was received with the ISS still over the Atlantic. Anyway, this is number 9 of the series, received at 09:33 UTC:

I am rather late for this event which runs from the 24th to 31st December 2020. Due to all manner of things, Christmas included, I only managed to have a go at receiving the images on the night of the 28th. The ISS pass was in the early hours so I just left things running. Among several partial images including identifiable bits of 3 of the 12 images I found this one: Not too bad for a co-linear mounted inside the loft with a snow covered roof. I actually saw another image arriving from the ISS while approaching Spain at around 10:25 on the 29th. Typically, in my rush last night to set everything up I forgot to tick the 'Auto slant' setting in QSSTV...

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The PiBox is almost completed. It's taken far too long due to all sorts of silly things like having to get fans because a dry run indicated the poor little boards were getting a bit hot, having to get bolts for the fans because I had none long enough, and having to get a connector for the 1-wire (actually 3 wires!) lead from the central heating sensors. So, there is is. Two fans on the left, 5V PSU bottom right, gigabit Ethernet switch above that, then the Pi's: top is the PiStar with the DVMega board which has coax to the rear panel and then a dummy load, middle is the ASD-B and central heating monitor Pi, and the bottom is a general purpose one with various bits on such as rtl_tcp. The lower two boards have USB-A sockets on the rear of the case for the two SDR sticks, one for the ADS-B antenna and one to attach to a Discone for general use. But there is an issue. I had originally intended this to sit in the shack but those fans are just too annoying. Not loud, but constant. I suspect the box will end up in the…