Houston, we have SSTV.
The Hamateur Radio Club at my High School is looking into doing Slow Scan TeleVision (SSTV). SSTV is a way to transfer images using sound data - in fact, it uses the same frequency bands as human voices and car alarms.
As such, I downloaded some Windows program and set to work testing it. I don’t have my ham license yet, so since it works on sound, I played the signal through my speakers on one computer and picked it up on the other end of the room with my microphones. This approach has problems - for one, my speakers suck, so they output a very poor noise. Secondly, my microphone sucks, so it can’t hear well. Because of these two problems, I have to play the audio loud enough that I can hear it 120’ away on the far end of my house.
In case you didn’t know, I work in a twelve foot cube that’s packed so full of computers that it heats up to over 90 degrees on a regular basis. SSTV sounds a lot like a car alarm. Spending my afternoon in a small heated box with a car alarm just to transfer a 240×320 color picture ten feet is an experience to be avoided (it takes about 2 minutes to transfer one picture that size). I’m sure that over radio it’s not so loud.
I will say, though, that I was impressed with the software I was using. MMSSTV has it’s own idiosyncrasies, but it works both intuitively and out of the box, and is fun to mess with to boot.
