1 Year of SSTV

12 months ago today I received my first SSTV image - well, kind of. Not yet a licensed HAM - having only just reached out to the local club and trying to make arrangements for a remote assessment, I was stuck using an RTL-SDR hooked up to a discone mounted on the back of the house connected over a rather long run of RG58. 

There being an ISS SSTV event on - the primary motivator for my deciding to have another crack at getting into the hobby, I was eager to see what happened.

12 months on, I'd call that a disappointing result. At the time it seemed miraculous - a tiny little USB gizmo connected to little antenna pulling an image from space? Wow. Even if it was only part of it. 

Then of course, I started seeing people receiving complete images using Baofengs connected to mobile phones which made me realise this was not a great result and that I'd be able to do better.

Now, I'm generally annoyed if I don't have complete images - and full sets of them - achieved mostly with a 20+ year old radio, a larger, higher antenna connected via RG213 given the run length and a PC. And I also have my head around what is going on and why. Something I really didn't get 12 months ago. 

This event started me back down this path - one I'd thought about in late 2016, having brought a cheap Baofeng to use as a scanner and realising I should probably have a license given it was a transmitter. The late nights up with my baby son turned quickly into nights of being in an exhausted stupor where my interest in anything other than him going to sleep waned. Life happened.

I loved space as a kid. I loved electronics as a kid. The idea that I could tie up things I once loved into something that had caught my interest in days gone by got me curious. Then I heard I could buy a gizmo that could make it all work. Then like the typical middle aged male with a high enough income to occasionally indulge in my whims, that spiralled. Antennas.. Maybe a radio would work better a receiver? Maybe I should just get a license so this is all kosher? And so on. 

Here we are now. 12 months on. It's still a buzz to see an image coming from space appear on my computer screen. I manage server clusters containing the latest in high performance computing worth millions of dollars with insane amounts of storage and RAM and it's still not as a cool as throwing together some tech that's been around longer than I have to receive an image being sent from the ISS.