KS6M Amateur Radio SSTV Images

Introduction

Here are the most recent slow-scan television (SSTV) images received at Amateur Radio station KS6M in Oakland, California, USA.

• What is amateur ("ham") radio?
• What is slow-scan television?

Information about this page

Current KS6M SSTV Status

What does this status indicator mean?

About this page's content

You loaded or last refreshed this page on Monday at 23:15 US Pacific Time (Tuesday 7:15 UTC). To refresh this page and see the most recently-received images, press your keyboard's [f5] key or use your Web browser's refresh function.

The images

1 (newest):

2

3

4 (oldest)

The Status Indicator

The status indicator is a graphic image that shows the SSTV-receiving status of amateur radio station KS6M.

• Off the Air: KS6M is not listening for SSTV signals (or is not uploading received images to the Web).
• On the Air nn Meters: KS6M is listening for SSTV signals on a generally-accepted frequency on the amateur radio band shown and uploading received images to the Web. (For example, "20 Meters" refers to the amateur radio band between 14.000 MHz and 14.350 MHz, where 14.230 MHz is conventionally used for SSTV.)

How it works

It may not be immediately obvious just what this Web page is doing! Here's how it works:

1. An amateur radio operator somewhere transmits an SSTV signal, which is an image (a photograph or drawing) translated into sound. The signal may last as long as two minutes.
2. My radio station KS6M receives the radio transmission.
3. My receiver converts the radio transmission to an electrical signal and sends it over wires on my desk to a sound card. I may choose the sound card inside my computer, in which case the signal first goes through an interface device, West Mountain Radio's RIGblaster plug & play. Or I may choose the sound card within the Tigertronics SignaLink™ USB device, when then routes the signal into my computer.
4. An SSTV application running on my computer is "listening" to the sound card, recognizes the signal as an SSTV transmission, and automatically translates it into an image and saves the image as a .jpg file to a specific folder on the computer's hard drive. Radio noise and propagation variances will disturb the signal; the result will be garbled portions of the image. (The SSTV application that I use for this is JE3HHT's MMSSTV. This application can also send images as SSTV signals.)
5. Another application automatically detects the file in the folder and uploads the file over my Internet connection to a specific folder on a Web server, doing some file renaming and deleting along the way. (The application that I use for this is KE5RS's FTP Widget.)
6. That file can be seen on this Web page (and on other Web pages!). Yes, all of that happens automatically, even while I'm not at home.

Disclaimer

I often do not monitor this receiving-and-uploading system, so I have no control over the content of the images that are received and displayed. I can't be responsible for any inappropriate content that is posted to my Web sites with this system should another radio operator transmit it and my station receive it. (That should not happen: we amateurs are not permitted to transmit profane content.)

/ John Rabold KS6M