Tutorial: send and receive SSDV over AFSK 1200 via V/U FM Voice satellite transmitter

Very well done, it’s been a fun for the last few days live testing this on a satellite zipping through space!

For context, PRTeksat and AMSAT-ID scheduled a special schedule to test whether an SSDV image can be sent via satellite through its amateur radio repeater payload.

Before, we have very limited knowledge and experience with SSDV beside decoding images sent by another satellite ASRTU-1/AO-123. @bali then steps in making the script to generate SSDV packets and modulation so it can be sent via IO-86 FM repeater. At first we thought it is possible to sent high data rate with FSK modulation up to 9K6 like on AO-123, but finally scaled down to AFSK 1K2 due to the radio and repeater up there being analog limited.

There are two sessions that we managed to test the transmission, day 1 late night on January 8 we tested a low packet count and very compressed image of just 3kB. I sent the image from the tip of Sumatra through the satellite and received in Bali, and it was successful! On second day, I managed to run the tx script made by bali and we sent 3 different images (1 by me and two by bali) to check whether the script can decode the different images in a single recording. What I like for SSDV is that the image is split into packets and instead like most image transmission mode where you need to have perfect transmission and reception to get perfect image, with SSDV you can run the transmission multiple times and if only part of the single transmission get through due QRM, other image transmission cycle can fill the gap.

And by the way, I think you shouldn’t sent any transmission beside FM voice through most amateur satellite, but many thanks for PRTeksat and AMSAT-ID which regularly do scheduled experiments on IO-86 satellite. I’m very open for other operators to give limited schedule on the satellite to have some experiments (SO-124 used to have digital modes every Wednesday :slight_smile:). And also thanks to @bali who made very nice script and tutorials on how to sent/receive SSDV!

Maybe it’s not much but hey, I’m keeping the amateur radio spirit to do experiment :smiley:

73,
Adhito
YG4SLJ

Two partially decoded image and one complete image sent via SSDV through IO-86:



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