SSTV and HAM radio

Something I have been doing lately is setting my RTL-SDR to record ‘local’ SSTV traffic on 20m, 14.230Mhz. I’ve really enjoyed what I am able to pick up and hear with such a simple antenna although there is a lot of room for improvement. Previously I had the antenna inside the house and while that did work on occasion I was not able to pick up enough of the signal through the noise that a house just makes these days so it was time to move the antenna outside.

I setup a new dipole outside this time. This one is made of the same antenna I was using indoors, which was just two long copper wires cut to length. Now I have two long wires cut to length held up in the air with a painters pole ooooooh super fancy.

In reality it’s been working WAY better for me now that I have it ousdie of the house.

I am very happy with its performance. But I need to move the radiating element out of the brush and swap that for the ground instead and that should help my worry about accidentally making some of that dry brush upset in the summer time. It should be okay in the winter but I think I still have some tinkering to do before transmitting on this antenna. The solder joints are one of my erlier attempts and not a good start. Also, no Balun which is going to cause some issue so need to fix that before I transmit too.

I’ve been adding images that I have collecting while listening around and been putting them on my ham page of this site. I think I will continue to do that for now until I get too many.