Receiving ARISS SSTV transmissions around 2018-04-12

The SSTV (slow-scan television) transmitter on the International Space Station (ISS) was active world wide as part of Cosmonautics Day (April 12). Images were related to the Interkosmos project. We managed to capture at least a partial version of almost all images, the only exception is the one with the Hungarian cosmonaut Bertalan Farkas on it (what a coincidence).

A crude wire antenna was used in the attic, attached to a 30-meter feedline and our Yaesu FT-7900E. The setup can be seen on the right, including the radio, the power supply, an Ethernet switch for remote administration and a USB sound card for quality capture. A 4-day audio recording was made in uncompressed mono PCM @ 48 kHz using FFmpeg to a Matroska container, latter was chosen to avoid 32-bit overflow errors in WAV files. MMSSTV was used later to decode the recordings.

Timestamps below are all in UTC, dates are in ISO8601 format. All images were captured by our club station HA5KBP located at grid square JN97ML in Budapest, Hungary.

Image 2/12, received between 14:17:59 and 14:28:32 on 2018-04-11 (max elevation was 38.25°)



Image 3/12, received between 12:41:11 and 12:51:54 on 2018-04-11 (max elevation was 87.03°)



Image 5/12, received between 16:38:57 and 16:49:38 on 2018-04-12 (max elevation was 67.13°)



Image 6/12, received between 13:25:30 and 13:36:07 on 2018-04-12 (max elevation was 43.32°)



Image 7/12, received between 14:54:12 and 15:04:54 on 2018-04-14 (max elevation was 56.32°)



Image 9/12, received between 13:17:27 and 13:27:59 on 2018-04-14 (max elevation was 37.47°)



Image 10/12, received between 11:40:36 and 11:51:19 on 2018-04-14 (max elevation was 76.55°)



Image 11/12, received between 10:56:47 and 11:07:10 on 2018-04-13 (max elevation was 35.48°)



Image 12/12, received between 10:04:50 and 10:14:42 on 2018-04-14 (max elevation was 21.49°)