Listening To the International Space Station The Cheap Way

As a follow-up to some of my weather satellite projects, I tried my hand at listening to the ISS. Lately they’ve been sending down Slow Scan TV (SSTV) images, which are kind of like power point slides sent via fax tones over ham radio! I tried a variety of old ham radio junk I have lying around, but the easiest and most reliable equipment turned out to be the cheapest! The thing that worked best for me was a ~$30 Baofeng radio with a cell phone held up to the speaker. The phone is running an app called “Robot36“ which decodes the SSTV tones into an image. (A lot of hams look down on these Baofeng radios, but mine works better than my old Yaesu or Icom 2M handhelds, and was a lot more affordable brand new!) More info on SSTV here: Robot36 App: I tried various Windows and Linux programs but didn’t have much luck getting any of them to work. The only one that kind of worked was “RX-SSTV“, but the image came out distorted and the user interface was clunky and confusing. The Android app does everything automatically and works with little to no user input. I might revisit this next time there’s an SSTV event, especially if I build a better antenna! Saveitforparts t-shirts and other merch at Join this channel to get access to perks: Or support me via Patreon at