Great news that the International Space Station is going to get the SSTV station back on the air for an event. It was a great surprise so there was not a lot of notice. I needed to get out and repair the rotor cable to the elevation rotor. In addition to getting the cable fixed I ran another run of coax and put it all in an under ground conduit. With that done I had two days to test things out before the event started.
I had the system set up with my FT-991A doppler corrected by MacDoppler. I had MultiScan 3B running to decode the transmissions. I was running version 1.9.5, not sure where I got it as the last release on the official site is 1.9.1. It worked great for the first couple of passes but was not automatically saving images. This was a problem as I decode 2-3 per pass so I lost a lot of images. In the second day there was a major issue with image skewing. I reverted to 1.9.1 and also fired up Black Cat SSTV. So both are decoding off the same output. The event started an hour earlier than planned but I was ready and on the first pass and was the only one to grab image 11. I submitted it to ARISS and it was posted in the gallery.
I only have 2 more of the 12 images to decode. There was a problem today (10/10) where the radio on the ISS was in APRS mode so a couple of passes were lost until they fixed it. Tomorrow the station will be off for a school contact but should be back on for 3 more days. I already qualified for a number of SSTV awards!
Here is a little video of my antennas tracking the ISS. I’ve added the actual audio of the SSTV transmission on top.
Here is the complete gallery of images I was able to download over the course of the event.
