Today I have successfully received and decoded an SSTV transmission from ISS. This is the result:
In this post I will give a quick summary of what I have been using and how it worked for me.
Hardware:
- USRP B200 - this is a high-end SDR but RTL-SDR dongle should also be fine
- Dipole antenna - I bought this from the RTL-SDR store; each side of the dipole should be around 50cm to make it resonant to 145.800MHz which is the frequency of the SSTV transmission
- Laptop
I don’t have a base station, so I brought everything on this rooftop (the Baofeng radio is not used):
Software:
- gpredict - I have used this to track ISS, it gives a nice schedule of all upcoming passes
- gqrx - my favorite SDR program; tune to 145.800MHz FM and record the audio; this is my recording
- qsstv - an open-source program for SSTV decoding; the user interface is pretty bad but it does the job
That’s all, have fun!
73!