I love the idea, Cathryn, but it needs to have some mechanism to prevent someone(s) from continually uploading an image or images, filling the queue. History with the ISS and unattended stations beaconing incessantly for apparently vanity purposes to show up on the "Stations Heard" site suggests that this Commons resource could be tragically made inaccessible to most. Also need to have some way to securely link an image to a call sign, so that inappropriate content can't be uploaded anonymously.
But, with those measures in place, I think it would be a great way to bring in the larger community, and see what's going on in Ham Radio around the world. Basically, it's a regular store-and-forward BBS system with a dedicated message type (image), and an on-going download similar to the ISS Slow Scan TV events. I can imagine someone lashing up an SDR receiver and an electronic "picture frame" to display a rotating image from space.
Greg KO6TH
Cathryn Mataga via AMSAT-BB wrote:
My pitch, store and forward tiny images. The receiver listens on the receive channel 9600 baud for digital images. It just listens only. Whenever it receives one with proper headers and without error, it stores it. Then on the downlink, it cycles through the last 20 or so, or about however many can be downloaded in an overhead pass. When the 21st picture comes in, it just throws away the oldest image. I suggest using .png formatted graphics with a file size limit of 8192 bytes, something like this? Enough pixels to be fun, but not so much to get unwieldy.
This would make a fun visual demo to show off amsat/ham radio -- the satellite would show a cool little slide show from stations around the world.
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