Today I took the afternoon off from work to test if I can receive some SSTV images from the ISS. One of the alumni of the Moscow Aviation Institute is part of the Russian crew. They were running some experiments for the SSTV transmission capability.

First I had to check whether it was possible for me to receive it given the passes the ISS is making over Ireland. I’m using some software on the iPhone for this: Satellite Tracker by Star Walk.

I did make a mistake because the original time slot of 1620-1740UTC was a bit too early, however there was a pass relatively close:

So I just switched on my Yaesu FT-857D with the ATAS-120A antenna on the back of the deck rack and hooked it to my laptop and lo-and-behold!

With this the full image:

I left the receiver running, suddenly I heard the second image pop up, then the signal dropped and reappeared again, must have been some interesting propagation path on the 2m-band.

But I did get a more skewed image (which makes sense given the Doppler shift that must be more pronounced now as I didn’t change the tuning frequency):

But with some correction it came out improved:

Note there were 12 images in total to receive but given the time I made available, I’m happy I got one and a half!