International Space Station set to Transmit SSTV this Weekend (July 18 – 19)

To commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz mission the International Space Station (ISS) is set to transmit 12 Slow Scan TV (SSTV) images this weekend. The images are set to transmit Saturday morning, July 18 10:30 UTC and will run through until Sunday, July 19 21:20 UTC, but they note that the dates are tentative and could be subject to change. The images will be transmitted at 145.80 MHz and will probably be sent in the PD180 SSTV mode with 3 minute breaks between each transmission.

SSTV is a type of radio protocol that is used to transmit low resolution images over radio. An RTL-SDR with appropriate antenna can be used to receive these images from the ISS. The signal is usually quite strong, so even a simple whip or long wire antenna may receive these images if placed in a good unobstructed view of the sky. 

As with the last ISS SSTV event we suggest that to decode the images you use SDR# and pipe the audio into MMSSTV, a freeware SSTV decoding software program. We also suggest using the settings recommended by “happysat”, which are enabling “Auto slant” and “Auto resync” under Options->Setup MMSTV->RX.

To know when the ISS is overhead you can track it online using heavens-above.com or isstracker.com. If using heavens-above to predict pass times remember to set it to show all passes, not just the visible ones. Received SSTV images can be submitted to the ARISS Gallery.

This event is being discussed on Reddit here. Here is the official release from ariss.org:

40 years ago this week, the historic joint Apollo-Soyuz mission was conducted.   Apollo-Soyuz (or Soyuz-Apollo in Russia) represented the first joint USA-Soviet mission and set the stage for follow-on Russia-USA space collaboration on the Space Shuttle, Mir Space Station and the International Space Station.  The Soyuz and Apollo vehicles were docked from July 17-19, 1975, during which time joint experiments and activities were accomplished with the 3 USA astronauts and 2 Soviet cosmonauts on-board.  Apollo-Soyuz was the final mission of the Apollo program and the last USA human spaceflight mission until the first space shuttle mission in 1981.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of this historic international event, the ARISS team has developed a series of 12 Slow Scan Television (SSTV) images that will be sent down for reception by schools, educational organizations and ham radio operators, worldwide.The SSTV images are planned to start sometime Saturday morning, July 18 and run through Sunday, July 19.  These dates are tentative and are subject to change. The SSTV images can be received on 145.80 MHz and displayed using several different SSTV computer programs that are available on the Internet. 

We encourage you to submit your best received SSTV images to:
http://spaceflightsoftware.com/ARISS_SSTV/submit.php

The ARISS SSTV image gallery will post the best SSTV images received from this event at:
http://spaceflightsoftware.com/ARISS_SSTV/index.php

Also, as a special treat, on Saturday July 18 the ISS cosmonauts will take time out to conduct an ARISS contact with students attending the Moon Day/Frontiers of Flight Museum event in Dallas Texas.  This Russian cosmonaut-USA student contact is planned to start around 16:55 UTC through the W6SRJ ground station located in Santa Rosa, California.  ARISS will use the 145.80 MHz voice frequency downlink (same as the SSTV downlink) for the Moon Day contact. More details about these contacts are provided at Upcoming Contacts.

The ARISS international team would like to thank our ARISS-Russia colleague, Sergey Samburov, RV3DR, for his leadership on this historic commemoration.

An example SSTV image from the last ISS SSTV event
An example SSTV image from the last ISS SSTV event which was to commemorate first man to space Yuri Gagarin’s would be 80th birthday.
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Kerteszradio

It is unbelievable. In present, transmitting old rusty mission’s relic pics. Why not sending sometimes a real pics inside the ISS – or ( it is most intersted) the outside space ? Or sunset from space . . . This postage stamps is amazing but not any other themes ?

Max

They are probably the same pics sent a few months ago. It is propaganda. On the other hand consider that a sunset a this low resolution and with a lot of noise in the picture will be even hard to understand what it is rapresenting

Max

I have spent a full day receiving SSTV transmissions from websdr in the UK a few months ago, but now it is too hot here in Italy to stay in front of the pc for long time. In this moment the temperature is 33°C inside home and it is almost midnight

m0odv

The last pass over Europe is 9am so this is of no use to us.Besides the last scheduled SSTV event did not even take place,just sat there like a lemon waiting and no SSTV transmitted.Useless!!

HE9JSD - Georges

Hello admin, good news. 😉

It is not PD 180 instead ?

73 from Switzerland, Georges