send memes with sound - covid2009

I first heard about SSTV from covid2009 on neocities, with a page full of memes and other pix transmitted through sound.

What I get from the page, is that SSTV, or Slow Scan Television is a picture transmission method used by amateur radio operators. You can also use SSTV just to encode images into audio, which can be stored on whatever audio format, and be played back to be decoded.

After hearing about this, I started doing some messing around with encoding and decoding SSTV signal using MMSSTV and decoded with RXSSTV on Windows.

Well, I don't know anything about all this HAM radio stuff, all I know is you can send images with sound, so here's some of my fun with SSTV.


There's several modes you can encode in. The default one I've been using has been "Scottie 1". The images have an interesting look to them.

The resulting images have a oddly fuzzy, ghostly and lo-fi quality. They look like haunted satellite TV signals from the late 1980s. This makes storing and sharing photos on cassettes possible!

- hotline cafe

The encoded images have an interesting fuzzy, ghostly quality to them, like tuning into a picture in a sea of static that is analog bandwidth.


image on left encoded in scottie 1, right encoded with robot 36

Depending on which enoding type you use, you can get vastly different results. I've mostly been using Scottie 1, which takes about 120 seconds to encode at 320x256. It's about average quality for SSTV, and has an interesting rippled effect and colors remind me of VHS encoding.

I also tried encoding some in Robot 36, which takes about 40 seconds to encode at 320x240, in a much softer image, with an overall green tint to it, and the much more noticable ripple. You can get some pretty cool looking results with R36.



Ran this through and it came out pretty cool.


I also tried recording the audio to cassette tape (Ferro Type I) as well, but the results were, while still cool looking, not exactly what I wanted. Later, maybe I'll try using one of my Chrome Type II tapes, and a better tape deck, better than the crappy Sanyo one that scared me when I was little cause the volume slider made ear-exploding scratching noises.

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gallery

more comin' soon, i gotta go thru my pix and find cool stuff to sstv'ize

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