So i was recently at a convention run by friends. I tend to align myself to the position of least uselessness, so I like to be helpful. Somehow this lead to my good nature being exploited for mediocre software1. One of the problems at these things is that while we go to great effort to produce a lovely convention booklet, no one actually reads it until the week after. Having the event schedule in there feels like a bit of a waste of time. …

This is a continuation of this post about my previous failures at DATV. Debug, Defrag, Defuzz and Start Again Okay, so Bournemouth didn’t go so well. Let’s try again - this time reading manuals and stopping to think. The goal for this project is simple - transmit and receive a DVB-S signal. Hardware What tools do I have available? CCC Camp Badge (HackRF) RTL-SDR Numerous Raspberry Pis Laptop (Linux) Probably a whole other pile of things Software There’s a few things I know about that could use: …

Digital Amateur Television After the RSGB Convention’s DATV talk, I’ve been super curious about playing more with DATV (Digital Amateur TV). It’s pretty cool - transmit broadcast standard video using low powers and homebrewe equipment. I remember many moons ago Iain, tj and I came up with an MPEG4 proof of concept and streamed Citizenfour between a hackrf and rtl-sdr. Naturally, to do it properly, I’m going to have to advance my license (work in progress, honest). …