Your first SSTV contact, start to finish

Step one: do not transmit

Spend your first session entirely receiving. This is not caution for its own sake — it is the only way to find out several things you need to know before you are any use on the air.

• That your receive chain works. If you cannot decode, transmitting is pointless: you would never see a reply.
• Who is actually active, and how often. HF SSTV comes in bursts.
• What the rhythm sounds like — how long transmissions run, how long the gaps are, how people answer each other.
• What good and bad look like. You will see clean pictures and overdriven ones in the same afternoon, which teaches you more about levels than any amount of reading.

Tune to 14.230 MHz USB, leave the decoder running, and go and do something else in the room. Pictures will appear.

Step two: prepare before you need it

Do not compose a picture while a contact is waiting. Have one ready:

• Cropped to 4:3, bright, high contrast.
• Your callsign in large bold text on a solid band at the top.
• Space left where you can add the other station’s callsign and a report.
• Something of yours — the shack, the antenna, the view. It is a conversation, and a stock image says nothing.

The constraints on what survives transmission are in preparing pictures.

Step three: pick your moment

Two ways in, and the second is easier.

Answer someone. A station finishes a picture and calls, or simply pauses. Wait for the transmission to end completely, count to five, and go. If you hear someone else start, let them — take the next one.

Call yourself. Send a picture with your callsign and a CQ on it, then stop and listen properly. This is slower and often unanswered, which is not a reflection on you.

Step four: what to send back

The exchange is short. Their callsign, your callsign, and how their picture arrived:

2E0XYZ de 2E0JWR
RSV 595
Chesterfield, IO93ge
TNX FER PIC

RSV is the SSTV report format: readability 1–5, strength 1–9, video quality 1–5 in place of tone. 595 is a clean picture from a strong station. Be honest — an inflated report is useless to the person receiving it, and the whole point is that they learn something about their signal.

Text large, bold, high contrast. They are reading it through the same noise you read theirs through.

Step five: log it

Callsign, date, time in UTC, band, mode, and the reports both ways. If you intend to chase awards or use eQSL later, a contact you did not log did not happen.

Open Signal writes this automatically — every completed exchange goes to its logbook with callsign, CAT frequency, mode and grid squares, and pushes to Wavelog, Cloudlog, eQSL and a UDP ADIF broadcast if you have them configured. It is the part of the hobby most likely to be skipped and least missed until it matters.

What actually goes wrong

• Transmitting too soon. The picture had not finished. Wait for the tones to stop, then wait more.
• Nobody answers. Usually nobody was there. Check the live network to see whether anyone is on the air before assuming the fault is yours.
• Your picture arrives damaged. Almost always drive — see levels and ALC.
• Nothing decodes at all. Check the sideband. HF SSTV is upper sideband on every band, including 40 and 80 metres.

A realistic expectation

You may not make a contact on your first attempt, or your second. That is the mode, not you: activity is clustered, propagation decides who can hear whom, and there are afternoons when 14.230 is silent for hours.

Receiving is not a consolation prize while you wait. A picture pulled off the air from two thousand kilometres away is the thing itself, and it is available to you before you ever key a transmitter.