Posted: 1/17/2015 9:55:01 AM EDT
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I was playing around yesterday with receiving FAX over HF using FLDIGI.
This is nothing new or revolutionary, but it was something I had never done before and was kinda cool to play around with. A local ham posted on Facebook that he was doing it and I had to give it a shot. I got some real nice clear images out of New Orleans of the weather in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic off of Florida. FLDIGI is some great software. I am one of those guys who never reads the "book" for anything and I am constantly discovering more stuff that it can do. If you want to try it, HERE is a link with the frequencies. And HERE is a link for doing it with FLDIGI. I had to play around to figure out how to tune it in, but in the end I just put the carrier in the middle of my waterfall. I don't really see much practical use for this; for me. But it is just another fun thing to play around with. You can also transmit FAX but again, I can't think of any reason I would want to. But you never know, so it's cool to play around with. I can remember reading in old ARRL Handbooks about guys sending FAXes over the air using actual old FAX machines but never knew anybody that did it. I guess it is about the same thing as SSTV was back then. |
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Quoted:
I used to decode WEFAX for hours on end. Back then we had a 9 pin dot matrix printer printing images. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.  WEFAX was some pretty cool stuff, especially back in the 80s and early 90s before the internet. I had friends that were blown away that I was getting those big GOES pictures of 1/4 of the earth on my 8088 PC from shortwave, a good 10 years before consumer internet was common. Grabbing real-time APT images from the satellites on 137MHz always got wows, too. |
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Yes, it seemed pretty impressive in the days of 8088 PCs and no internet. My old PK232 even has a parallel printer port, put there in case the user had a PC that couldn't process the graphics. I wasn't so challenged with a Hercules card and a splendid paper white monitor.
I think I spent the time to download a GOES image once, and decided it wasn't my cup of tea. |
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I played around with it some back in the '90s. I once tried it with my old one-tube regenerative receiver from the Novice days (1954) and it actually worked -- kinda. I had to keep touching up the tuning 'cuz 'gennys ain't the most stable radio around!
Picture of the 'genny: 
I occasionally put it on the air along with with my crystal-controlled transmitter when I feel like a little self-abuse. |
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Nice fire bottle!
I'm getting good maps from HI, Pt Reyes, and AK here in WA. They also transmit a facsimile of their transmission schedule. Fldigi will also transmit wefax images. Anybody want to try a wefax QSO? Another little-known fldigi capability is the WWV modem. It provides a tool for adjusting the sound card timebase to the WWV standard. It can then transmit a time mark and serve as a transfer standard to calibrate other stations. |
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Quoted:
Nice fire bottle! I'm getting good maps from HI, Pt Reyes, and AK here in WA. They also transmit a facsimile of their transmission schedule. Fldigi will also transmit wefax images. Anybody want to try a wefax QSO? Another little-known fldigi capability is the WWV modem. It provides a tool for adjusting the sound card timebase to the WWV standard. It can then transmit a time mark and serve as a transfer standard to calibrate other stations. Interesting, I am playing with that now. This is sort of the reason I posted about this. Over the last couple weeks I found out about something, on this forum, you could do using FLDIGI that I thought was cool (the frequency calibration function). So, I posted about something in FLDIGI that I didn't previously know about and it brought out yet another function of FLDIGI that I didn't know about. |