brainwagon

Got home, and didn’t feel like standing outside in the rain and wait for a satellite pass. But I did feel like doing something radio related. So, while sitting on the couch during Big Brother, and the first 10 minutes of a recorded episode of Boston Legal, I hacked together a simple program that did some of the heavy lifting in decoding an HF-FAX recording that I did yesterday. This was recorded from the Australian VMC station in Charleville. It doesn’t do determine the sync rate, the aspect ratio, nor does it really work very hard to get the color ranges right, but it does give an image (and much better than the decoder that’s part of cocoaModem). Witness:

I’ll undoubtedly get it working even better, but it’s encouraging.

Addendum: It’s odd, but I’m getting MUCH better signals from Australia than I am from Pt. Reyes. It’s like I’m getting some kind of horrific multipath from the nearer site. Very odd. I’ll investigate further some other time. In the mean time, I got another one, pulled it into gimp for a little fine tuning, and here’s the result (there is an odd artifact that appeared in two images that I made, so something might be going slightly wrong, I’ll have to check it out).

That’s enough for tonight.