Digital Amateur Television After the RSGB Convention’s DATV talk, I’ve been super curious about playing more with DATV (Digital Amateur TV). It’s pretty cool - transmit broadcast standard video using low powers and homebrewe equipment. I remember many moons ago Iain, tj and I came up with an MPEG4 proof of concept and streamed Citizenfour between a hackrf and rtl-sdr. Naturally, to do it properly, I’m going to have to advance my license (work in progress, honest). Before we hit that stage, though, I can work on receiving and fiddling about on an SDR at home. …

See Day 1 notes for the first half of this piece! Convention’s over! I left Milton Keynes at roughly 1630 after a full day of lectures and after a stopoff in Glasgow made it home at 3am. Total round trip of 1003 miles! That’s a long way to go for some radio chat. Day 2 was again insteresting, enthusing and inspiring - here’s a compressed colletion of the notes I took. …

So, I came down to the RSGB Convention to see what’s what in the world of radio. After day 1, it’s been good - Here’s a disorganised selection of my notes and thoughts. Session 1: Advances in Amateur TV Given by Noel Matthews, G8GTZ Noel started out telling us about the bands that ATV is on these days, the ones that caught my interest were: 13CM (Roughly 2432MHz) 70CM (2MHz, Digital centered around 437MHz) 2M 2M D-ATV 2M Digital Amateur TV is really interesting, it seems. …

WOW I HAVE SO MANY RADIO THINGS TO TALK ABOUT! There’s been lots rolling about inside my head recently, mostly related to radio. I’m doing lots of wee things in the exciting world of amateur radio to fill my time as summer hits. I’m focussing mostly on packet radio and digital modes, and have done various vaguely interesting things over the last month or two. TCP/IP over AX.25 This is a thing that happened with Iain / 2M0STB in mid march. Using our testbed setup of a Yaesu FT-7900 and FT-817, we invoked the magic of soundcard modems (Direwolf and Soundmodem) to make the magic of modern networking happen over a 1200 baud AFSK link. …

Having been curious for a while, I’ve decided it’s time to start properly playing in the world of packet radio. Not just APRS, though - that’s a ‘solved problem’, and quite simple to get a quick hang of. My main station radio that lives in the hackerspace is a Yaesu FT-7900, and it’s a lovely piece of kit. I’ve got a data cable with proper, separate PTT and audio out/in. It’s got a 9600baud mode as well, so hopefully I can get faster data once all of this has been set up. …