Category: General

I’ve dabbled with Slow Scan before, but it’s not something that’s ever really captured my imagination.

However, when I saw that the ISS was going to be transmitting SSTV round the clock for seven days, as part of an experiment in conjunction with ARISS, it piqued my interest… almost anything to do with the ISS tends to make me sit up and take notice.

And so, armed with the latest orbital information from Heavens Above and a visual representation of the station’s position from N2YO, I set about trying to successfully capture some images from the ISS.

The option with the least amount of kerfuffle was to connect my SDRPlay to my X-200 colinear and then install a Virtual Audio Cable to feed the output from SDRUno into an SSTV decoder… RX-SSTV is my preferred piece of software for this task, as I have no desire to ever transmit SSTV.

OK, setting up the VAC was a little troublesome but I got there.

Actually decoding the images proved to be far less successful, with lots of noise giving me only partially decoded images.

On the umpteenth attempt though, I set everything up and just left it running whilst I took the dog out, fully expecting yet another only semi-successful attempt.  Upon my return though, I was rewarded with the following image: 100% copy!

The ISS was passing over Germany when this image was received. If I have my Pythagoras right, that’s a distance of about 450 miles.

As someone pointed out to me, it is – of course – Line Of Sight, but even so, I think that’s not bad for 2m FM into a white stick on the side of the house!

And I did pick it up briefly, loud and clear for just a few seconds, as it passed over Budapest yesterday. Pythagoras tells me that’s about 960 miles!

As requested by ARISS, I submitted my image to them and I was rewarded with my first ever Amateur Radio Award – that’s it in the pic at the top.

Slow Scan still hasn’t captured my imagination, but it was a bit of fun.

Today I went to St Neots, in Cambridgeshire.

And wandered around a damp field.

Full of damp men.

Looking at a load of old, damp, radio-related tat.

And had a great time… as did we all, I think.

It’s the first radio rally I have been to in nearly two years and it was good to catch up with some like-minded nerds, who I haven’t seen in a while.

And I grabbed a couple of bargains too, which pleased me greatly.

It looks like the rally calendar is starting to get back to normal.

Hopefully, the next one will be just as enjoyable.

And not as damp.

Morse code is an anachronism.

Invented and used in the 1840’s, it seems somewhat out of place in today’s high-speed world, where data rates are so high that whole sentences of text can be sent in the blink of an eye.

It’s an outmoded form of communication, that just doesn’t sit well with modern  methods.

And yet… it does.

It is still used by the military – not necessarily as the main basis of contact nowadays, but certainly as a fallback, I’m sure.

And in the world of Amateur Radio, it is still a much sought-after skill amongst many.

There are plenty of amateurs out there who can do Morse.  Many of them excel at it.  And there are even some that won’t use any other method to communicate over the air.

Sadly, I’m not one of them.

I would LOVE to be able to read morse code, properly.  I can send at slow speeds and I can read it at very slow speeds. Very slow. Very, very slow. Reading is the hard part.

Rather like learning a new language (and ostensibly, that’s what it is), there are many different methods for learning it. Over the years I have tried reading books (Duh!); listening to tapes and listening to other operators sending. I have tried several PC programs and mobile phone apps. I have built machines for practicing with (see picture above), eventually taking them apart and using the bits for another project, because I was getting nowhere.

Frustratingly, in my teens, I did learn how to read and send, and could do so at about five or six words a minute.  If only I’d kept it up.

Similarly, I used to be able to parlez francais to a reasonable degree.

But I allowed them both to lapse and nowadays I struggle to learn either.

And it really annoys me.

I’ll admit that this is partially down to commitment. I don’t seem to have the time nowadays to study for such things.

And the inclination. That’s kind of gone too: I want to learn it, but I don’t want to put in the effort.  Like the rest of the MTV generation (yes, I think I just about fall into that category) and, as Freddie Mercury sang: “I want it all and I want it now”.

And so, after several months of “giving it another go”, I have hung up my headphones.

Again.

For the last time.

That’s it! I have resigned myself to the fact that morse code will forever evade me.

No more, will I try learning and decyphering that strange sound of dits and dahs pouring from my radio speaker.

No more, will I spend hours in the car listening to an 800Hz tone beeping out letters of the alphabet to me.

No more will I drive the family mad, as I sit in my room badly tapping away at a morse key.

No more, will I… who am I kidding? Give it three months and I’ll be back at it for another half-hearted attempt.

This morning, I visited the National Radio Centre in Bletchley Park.

It was this: most excellent!

By chance, I’d happened to pick a day when an event to celebrate the breaking of the Enigma code was taking place.

An Amateur Radio station in Italy, was broadcasting messages in Morse code, that had been encrypted with the Enigma cipher and various stations around the world were trying to pick up these signals and decrypt them.   I – along with many others – watched with interest as the amateur radio operators received and decoded the Morse code, writing the 5-character blocks onto a replica form to that which was used in Bletchley Park during WW2.

This was then handed to another chap, who was giving a superb presentation on the workings of a genuine Enigma machine that sat on a table before him. His audience was enthralled as he decoded the message letter by letter.

Afterwards, I took a quick walk around the mansion house. It had changed a lot since I last visited it back in the eighties, when I worked for BT. Back then, we used it mainly for recreation, as I remember, but it has now been restored to it’s former glory.  The picture above shows one of the downstairs rooms which – when we used to go there and if memory serves me correctly – housed a pool table. It now – as you can see – gives an accurate depiction of what it would have looked like in the 1940s.

All too soon, my time ran out and I had to leave.

But I’ll go back again soon.