BATC Forum

I'm getting back into ATV moreover want to get into the DTV through VK3RTV in Victoria Australia since more challenging technically and closer to home.
I am in the process of reinstating my Amateur licence being inactive for over 8 years? Was VK3TAL (taken) no I'll be hopefully get VK3EHT. (Extra high tension) 22Kv as in my old television servicing days! I use to work at HSV-Channel 7 Melbourne in the late 80's early 90's in Monitor maintenance and Camera maintenance before moving into science.

Question,
To get the ball rolling start getting some gear together a good quality Test chart generator (Raspberry Pi based) FPGA based Software not sure what's the go?
What do you recommend which has good specs and easy to get going? I'm ok with the soldering iron since I have a pro audio repair business going.

Looking at free software FML test Chart however the link to it is broken and unavailable to download.

http://www.oodletuz.fsnet.co.uk/soft/tcmaker.htm

Anyone have a working link or alternatively, able to send me the program?

All ears hope to be up by November this year once my DATV-Express materialises.

Regards

Rob

Rob,
If you send me your email address, I can send you the zipped installation file for the test card maker programme.
g8vpg@aol.com
73 Shaun.

hi Shaun,
I am also interested in that file!

i2ndt@yahoo.it

Claudio

after having received Shaun's e-mail with the TCMAKER file I realized that I could have used web.archive.org to find the dead website...and here it is!

https://web.archive.org/web/20160609203 ... cmaker.htm

and if you click on the link "The Test Card Definition Resource" on that page you will go to another site full with patterns which, I guess, can be used with TCMAKER!!!

Claudio

Hi Rob VK3EHT,

I have not researched any hardware that may be required for the Test Chart Generator that is part of this posting thread...but since the software is fairly old (last revised 2004) I thought I would suggest an alternative approach for you to consider that does not require any additional hardware or soldering and just uses JPEG file(s) that you create or find for a test pattern.

Since you mention DATV-Express, you may be interested in considering using vMix software to transmit a test pattern or a slide-show of test patterns on DATV. The only two constraints are (1) runs on Windows software and (2) the free version of vMix Basic software only works with SDTV (StandardDefinition) video resolution. I had written an article about using vMix with DATV-Express called "DATVtalk15 – vMix - using a video-mixer software for DATV". This article was published in issue 43 of the free-to-download CQ-DATV e-magazine.

The article on vMix was also bundled up in a free-to-download compendium of my DATVtalk articles available at:
http://cq-datv.mobi/compendium.php
and is available in several e-book formats including the recently revised PDF version.

I hope that this may be of interest?....de Ken W6HHC

Thank you so much to all have replied to my post!
Shaun the link you provided is the software I was looking for and Ken, I'll check out you suggestion using vMix and see what it can do.

Great to be on a forum with so many knowledgable No to get my station up and running in Geelong.
Cheers

Rob

Also see RadCom, April 2014 for an animated (MPEG etc) test generator.

Regards, Mark