Thursday 13 June 2013

Freeband SSTV Reception with RTL-SDR

Over the last few days there has been a lot of activity on some of the normally quiet amateur and 'CB' bands due to some Sporadic-E propagation yesterday the 50MHz (6 metre band) was a mass of SSB signals as operators chased some DX contacts.

I set up a WSPR receiver using my FUNCube Dongle and got a few contacts on 6 meters over a couple of hours.


The 27 MHz (11 metre band) was also very active, while I know it can be an active band I normally don't receive much here due to location but last night I was getting lots of SSB transmissions by the 'DX Freebanders' and I even caught a couple of SSTV transmissions.

I didn't get many clear pictures not because the signals or audio was weak but mainly because one transmission would be broadcast over another before it had finished, causing noise, or worse stopping the decode and getting a truncated image..






Tonight conditions were similar but instead of the FUNCube Dongle+ I tried the RTL-SDR dongle with the R820T tuner chip which can tune down to the 27MHz frequencies and I managed to get some decent if again noisy and sometimes truncated images.





I used the SDRSharp/SDR# program and the free MMSSTV decoder, here are some more of posts concerning SSTV. I made a quick video showing the decode process.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I plugged in my RTL SDR and picked up man y of these really strong, funny considering I am using a RHCP wimo quad yagi and a innovantenna 2m vertical yagi on a rotator fed via duplexer pointing the other way:-)

Anonymous said...

check out my web on - https://eng075.com
has 11mtr sstv cams, sdr stns and more..
I also use SDR for signal reports, when I had XP it used to decode straight from the bowser or sdr program
now with win 7 i use virtual soundcard, or virtual cable, I run my packet programs and sometimes sstv repeater from a virtual win XP hard drive, works quite well, been doing sstv since early 80's, 1st one I had was a 48k spectrum, and G1FTU sstv program, lol, good ol days regards bob