SSTV
SSTV About
SSTV is a mode that uses a computer and an amateur radio transceiver to send and receive images over radio.
SSTV History
SSTV Modes
SSTV webcam page - how to
SSTV Webcam pages are used to show other hams what pictures have been received over a period of time at your shack. They are quite straightforward to create and plenty of help is available online. Firstly, join the FTP_widget Yahoo group. Members have access to html code for web pages. Use a website tool such as Dreamweaver to create a webcam page, and then add the html code from the yahoo group to it. An example of a page using this code can be found here. Upload the webcam page into your website. Next, download the ftp widget from KE5RS, and install it it on your PC. This widget collects pictures from a nominated folder and uploads them into the webcam page. The yahoo group also offers a good pdf tutorial on how to configure the widget for MMSSTV. The software runs only on PC's.
SSTV with a Macintosh computer
This article describes the use of a 1,8GHz G5 with1.5GB Ram and running OS 10.4.11. This machine comes with the facility to run two monitors, which proved to be very useful for SSTV.
Software There are currently two SSTV programs available for the mac. Macrobot from Sergei Ludanov KD6CJI and Multimode from Black Cat Systems.
Hardware Apart from the computer, an interface between computer and radio is required. Two commercially available interfaces have been used successfully with the computer described above and a Yaesu-FT-897, but undoubtedly others will work just as well. The Digimaster from ZLP Electronics and the Signalink USB from Tigertronics are both plug and play devices.
Setup Two monitors were used in this setup. Macrobot proved to be much easier to use for TX, whereas Multimode proved to be better for RX. This is because Macrobot did not seem to be as sensitive to weak signals and so RX stopped when the signals vary in strength. This problem was never resolved by the writer of this article, hence the use of both software programs. The TX interface and setup in Multimode was not found to be as easy to use as for Macrobot.