yay! a completed SSTV QSO!

Yay! KA4UPI in Dublin, GA heard me, and replied.

Thanks to KE5RS‘s Live SSTV page, I can see what I was sending – or at least, how it was received in Leander, TX by KE5RS:

This was sent in response to this:

Here’s what I send:

compared to what was heard in Texas:

Choosing images to send is difficult. The number of cheesecake images is a bit distressing. For good, free images, I use Wikimedia Commons; the one I’ve used for my CQ call is File:Burrowing owl smile.jpg.

SSTV is a fun little mode. I was saddened to hear that its creator, Copthorne Macdonald VY2CM, passed away late last year.

SSTV is go (sorta)

Luc gave a really good introductory talk about SSTV last night at the radio club. I’d had no luck at all running qsstv on this Ubuntu box, so I thought I’d try MMSSTV under Wine … and it worked!

I picked this image up from N5HIC on 14.230 MHz. Sure, I need to fix the sync, so my images aren’t slanted. I also don’t seem to be able to transmit, since it fails with a “Can’t open sound card (3)” error. But it’s a start!