Art WA8RMC reported increased attendance (maybe 150 hams) for the ATV forum sessions at the recent “Dayton Ham-vention” at the new location in Zena Ohio (right next door to Wright Patterson Air Base). Art reports good inventory on the DATV-Express boards.
Ken W6HHC continues to test-and-learn the terrific DVB-S DATV exciter Portsdown Project that is based around RPi-3 and the RpiDATV software of Evariste F5OEO (modified by BATC Portsdown team). Ken’s test set-up is using the (optional) DATV-Express board as the modulator (instead of the normal Portsdown modulator board). Ken has succeeded in transmitting video:
• MPEG-2 encoding with Pi-CAM
• H.264 encoding with Pi-CAM
• H.264 encoding with NTSC camera via EasyCAP video capture
• Test patterns via JPEG file
Block Diagram of Portsdown/RPi-3/DATV-Express using either Pi-CAM or EasyCAP or even JPEG file as video source
Charles continues to take a break from the DATV-Express efforts and is involved with with the team working on the USA Phase 4B geosync satellite project that will use DVB-S2X protocol primarily for data transmission of voice, JPEGs, and TCP-IP. Charles mentioned that there is no announced launch date for the Phase 4B satellite, yet.
Future DATV-Express Project Reports are expected to be quite short for the rest of 2017.
“Project speed set to back-burner”….de Ken W6HHC