SSTV on an iOS Device
From the “Oh, How Cool is That?!” department, is a video to round out a week’s worth of Ham Radio videos, showing an iOS device, (iPhone,iPod Touch,iPad) decoding an SSTV signal. I have seen a bunch of Ham Radio apps on the iTunes App store, but I seemed to miss this one. According to the link in the video’s description, the SSTV Decoder app is made by Black Cat Systems, who also make a few other Ham Radio programs for Macs. The webpage says “.. Just connect it to an HF radio (or even set it next to the radio’s speaker), tune in an SSTV frequency, and watch the pictures.” From the video I didn’t see a directly connected cable from the iPod Touch, so I’m guessing that they are using a 4th Generation iPod Touch with a built in microphone and have it sitting close to the radio to hear the SSTV tones. Still, it looks like it received a nice picture. But they could also have been replaying pre-recorded picture on the device too. Either way, it’s cool!
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Rich also writes a Tech blog and posts stories every Tuesday and Thursday on Q103, Albany’s #1 Rock Station website, as well as Amateur Radio stories every Monday thru Friday on AmiZed Studios and hosts a podcast called The Kim & Rich Show with his fiance’ Kim Dunne.
Rich the app world seems to grow daily, the latest for me was an app that allowed me to control my K3 remote. So this app is a new to as well…guess it’s just what you put in the search bar I guess.
You may have seen it if you have an Android phone or tablet, but the app that I’m excited about is “Satellite AR”. It is an augmented reality app that lets you look through the camera of your phone at the sky while it draws currently-visible satellites in the view where they should be in the sky. It tracks pretty much all known satellites, including the amateur radio sats and the ISS. One of these days, I’ll get a cross-boom yagi built, and when I do, I’ll be using this app to help me keep track of the sats.
I used this app on my iPad to receive SSTV images from ARISSat-1. It was the first time I had done SSTV, and it was very cool.