Dedicated to my activities in Amateur radio. Amongst other things, you will find English help in the use of Digital SSTV software 'EasyPal'. Resources listed under Digital SSTV category belongs to Software main collection, and get reviewed and rated by amateur radio operators. EasyPal - Easypal is a freeware DSSTV software uses the DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) encoding.
I happened to be monitoring 14.233 MHz and the guys that are using EASYPAL to send images are doing 'SSTV' in a very different manner than the normal RF sent images. They are uploading pictures to the internet via their computers and then they are using Amateur radio RF to send a web address and retrival CODE to each other. Then they acess the website via their internet connection, use the retrival code to download/view the picture from the internet. I can not decode the RF transmissions and actually view the images using any available RF software, the available software that will DECODE the images MUST be used on the internet only.
The use of the internet is a COMMERCIAL action, a (business) acessed internet server should not be a requirement to DECODE Amateur RF transmitted website links, and as such it is (may) be in violation of part 97. In my opinion (YMMV), this is really nothing more than sending images to each other via e-mail, except that ALL amateurs can NOT decode/use the links without using commercial means. I politely asked one of the people sending the 'links', how I could decode the RF transmissions if I did not have a commercial internet account, and was told 'that was my problem'. I then told him that I believed that requiring me to PAY a fee to decode Amateur RF transmissions was not legal.
His answer was that I should QSY. Don't misunderstand me, I like digital SSTV, but, this is in my opinion not legal. Am I way off base in my interpetion of part 97? I don't see how it could be illegal.
I sounds like it's similar to me coming on the air and saying 'I uploaded some pictures to this web site, go take a look at them'. Even if those images are only accessible with a paid subscription, I don't think that's a problem. It would be a problem if I owned that site and/or was promoting paid subscriptions over the air that I benefited from but other than that I don't see a problem. I wonder what the point of such an activity is.
I see it making sense if it's like 'I've posted a picture of my new antenna on my qrz.com page' but if this is some kind of a new mode where the whole protocol is listen for a URL and then go look at it online then that seems a little pointless although harmless. That sounds pretty weird and not much like what I've heard about EasyPAL SSTV. Are you saying that they're not sending the pictures over the air, just Internet links to them?
I've made a couple attempts at getting EasyPAL to work around here without much success - not sure why, but the need for two soundcards seems to have me confused somehow - the program doesn't recognize the soundcard I'm using. I haven't tried the latest version, either. But my interest in EasyPAL is it's ability to send a lot of data very quickly over HF, and haven't got to the point of decoding SSTV with it yet.