Dwelling on a Meme

Irish posted this meme on Friday and I thought a few words might bring it to life.  

A couple of things.  

First, this would have been a dream station in the 1960s.  It's entirely Collins radio products.  Because of the similarity in appearance between receivers like the 75S-1, 75S-2 and 75S-3, for example or the transmitters that began with 32S, I can't tell you what exactly is in there.  There's a couple of their transceivers but, again, there are model numbers that are rather similar looking.  The big cabinet on the left is 30S-1 linear amplifier. With this resolution picture, it's hard for me guess what radios those are. 

All that aside, a station like this, perhaps 55 or 60 years old, is entirely capable of posting memes just like this picture with text.  From your computer to other computers.  Shitposting memes doesn't have to be done by talking into a microphone.  It requires a modulation mode that many of you may have never heard of: Slow Scan Television or SSTV.  Slow Scan is very often used in the High Frequency (shortwave) spectrum because it only requires an audio bandwidth channel (less than 3 kHz), as opposed to the roughly 5 MHz wide slice of spectrum that fast scan television uses.  Hams can also do fast scan television, at least in the US, if they do their transmissions in the UHF spectrum, which are relatively "wide open spaces." 

The difference between slow scan and fast scan is (brace yourself) speed.  The old analog TV (now obsolete) did 25 to 30 frames per second.  Slow scan sends one picture in more like 30 seconds.  The thing here is that "TV" in the name is a misnomer.  It's not moving pictures, it's more like a slide show.  TV sends nearly identical frames in those 30 frames/second, so they all have to be the same size.  With slow scan you can send different sizes.  Bigger pictures take more time.  

The drawback to SSTV is that an HF channel can change during that half minute or more and the image can get corrupted.  It's not an error-correcting protocol.  Nothing says one couldn't be developed; heck, there might some out there that I haven't heard of.  

Nowadays, most transmission and reception starts and ends in computer.  There are various pieces of software that will take a jpeg, like this meme, convert it to audio tones and send to another hams computer across town or literally anywhere on HF.  It has moved off desktop computers onto phones and tablets.  When I played around with SSTV some years ago, a popular PC program was freeware from a Japanese ham Makoto Mori, JE3HHT, called MMSSTV.  It's from the days of Windows 98.  This club does an introduction to the mode and demonstrates Android operating system SSTV.  Of course, any software like this is going to run under Apple's iOS, too. 

To interface the computer to the radio usually requires a small box that connects to the computer sound card on one end and to the radio's microphone and headphones on the other.  I haven't shopped for something like this for an old radio like these, so I don't have any manufacturers names to look for.