SSTV event from the International Space Station

In commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of ARISS, the International Space Station is transmitting Slow Scan Television on 145.800. The SSTV event started on the 20th July and will continue until the 24th.

SSTV transmissions from the ISS are usually very strong. Therefore, I decided to let my SatNOGS ground station receive all ISS passes during this event. After two nights and eight passes, I already got eight different images. The images contain a label “x/12” suggesting that there are 12 different images being transmitted. The event will continue until Monday the 24th July, 18:00 UTC, so there is still plenty of time to receive all images.

My setup

As I mentioned above, the setup I am using is my SatNOGS ground station. It’s basically a 137 MHz Turnstile antenna connected to an Airspy R2 SDR receiver.

A pass can contain up to three SSTV transmissions but with my setup usually only one transmission is good enough to decode into an image (I also have trees in the line of sight). Therefore, I trim the audio using Audacity, convert to 48 kHz, 16 bit PCM in WAV format, and finally load the WAV file into Qsstv 9.2.4. This gives very nice images, as you can see below.

I also tried live decoding using Qsstv and this is working well also.

SSTV decode in progress with QSSTV

Received images

Image 1/12

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Image 2/12

Received with W2BFJ SatNOGS ground station

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Image 3/12

Not received…

Image 4/12

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Image 5/12

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Image 6/12

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Image 7/12

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Image 8/12

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Image 9/12

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Image 10/12

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Image 11/12

Received with W2BFJ SatNOGS ground station

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Image 12/12

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