HAMTV from the ISS - How to watch the merger at a contact

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Please note that the capacity for realtime clients is extremely limited. Please co-ordinate your use of these methods with the HAMTV Operations Team, else this may cause problems for events and/or your IP address may be blacklisted.

You can contact the HAMTV Operations Team by email ( HamTVOps@ariss-i.org ), or on the ARISS discord: https://discord.gg/MjhZeQWc

  • Windows / Mac
    • MPV - Works best, although controls can be unintuitive, see section below.
    • VLC - Not recommended due to frequent 'stalling' on TS errors when reception is not perfect.
  • Raspberry Pi
    • MPV - Works best
    • OMXplayer - works nearly as well as MPV, only works on old hardware (Pi 1,2,3, not 4,5).
    • VLC - Not recommended due to frequent 'stalling' on TS errors when reception is not perfect.

MPV Player on Windows

Pre-packaged (recommended)

Download and unzip the latest non-test package from: https://live.ariss.org/hamtv/software/mpv/

To run: Double-click on 'mpv-hamtv.bat'

This will open the mpv window showing the ARISS logo, while continuously listening for the HAMTV feed from the merger in the background. A terminal window will also open in the background but this can be ignored.

You can fullscreen the player at this time and it'll automatically show the HAMTV live stream.

Testing

Test player packages are available, these can be used for testing with an artificial signal for testing at the venue before the contact.

These are connected to the Test Merger instance. Artificial streams can be run on this by the HAMTV Operations team.

Self Assembled

Download "mpv-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc" from the latest version at https://nightly.link/mpv-player/mpv/workflows/build/master.

  • Add the three files below to the same directory as 'mpv.exe'
    • 'ariss_logo_new_onblack_1080.png'
    • 'hamtv-playlist.m3u'
    • 'mpv-hamtv.bat'
  • Run 'mpv-hamtv.bat'

OMXplayer on Raspberry Pi

This solution uses the hardware MPEG2 decoder, which is only present on the Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 models. (Not on the 4 & 5, and unlikely to be present on any future models)

The use of this decoder also requires the drivers that have been deprecated in recent Raspbian versions, so the latest compatible is Stretch (9): https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite/images/raspbian_lite-2019-04-09/2019-04-08-raspbian-stretch-lite.zip

This will require the purchase of an MPEG-2 Codec Key for each hardware unit, NB this may take up to 48 hours to arrive: https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/

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