[aprssig] APRN news from Dayton!

[Scott Miller]

> Do you mean he has now encased the naked SSTV cam shown on his website at:
>
> <http://wiki.argentdata.com/index.php/SSTVCAM> ?

It's a different camera module, but still naked - I gave up trying to 
find an enclosure form factor that would work for everyone and decided 
to make it an easily embeddable thing.  The new one has #2-56 screws 
holding it together and you could use longer ones to mount it in a case.

> documentation of disasters or anything else. Fine details (parallel
> clapboard siding, fences with parallel wires, overlaid text,etc) aliases
> into shimmery rainbows of colored fringes on contrast lines.

I find Robot 72 to be close enough to Scottie 1 in quality for most 
applications.  But in any case, it currently supports Robot 36, Robot 
72, Scottie 1, and Scottie 2.  You select which mode you want by 
grounding a combination of two pins.

> The problem is that there is no display of what the camera is seeing, or
> any way to focus.
>
> Is a normal NTSC output available from the camera daughter board? My
> Garmin Nuvi 855 has a NTSC video input intended for a car backup camera.
> The 4.3" Nuvi screen could make a really nice viewfinder for the "mobile
> LiveCAM" if the device has an NTSC output.

Not for this version.  It's a serial output (OV528 chipset) camera.  4D 
Systems sells a small display that they've got working with the same 
camera, and I might try that.  And my next SSTV project is a scan 
converter - it'll take NTSC or PAL through a decoder chip.  It needs a 
CPLD to run the frame buffer, though, and I need to learn that part. 
Unless someone wants to do a bit of freelance HDL work for me...

> One can achieve a VASTLY better live SSTV system by using a $225 Asus or
> Acer netbook. These lightweight (about 2 lbs) devices are full Windows
> PCs with Ethernet and WiFi connections, a sound system and a 120GB hard
> disk or larger. The netbook's built-in Webcam is full VGA resolution
> (640x480 pixels) or higher. A simple pair of audio cables can connect
> the netbook's sound system to the TX/RX audio of a radio.

The SSTVCAM has a 640x480 camera, and in the future I might experiment 
with some higher resolution modes.  But yeah, it's not going to match a 
cell phone or PC.  It's intended to fill specific niches like high 
altitude balloons.  It weighs an ounce or so, draws a few mA when it's 
idle and maybe 30 mA average while transmitting, and works great for 
one-to-many transmissions where you don't have an opportunity for retries.

Scott
N1VG