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Fax digi sign order

Oh youtubers and fellow hams marine weather facts is the subject today now if most of you should be familiar with fax machines they're a pretty common sight in the office back in the early 1900's fax machines were completely mechanical devices most fax machines used a rotating drum as you can see in this image here the machine had this drum and they would put a piece of paper on it that had a silvery coating on the side and then resting against the paper was a needle and this needle would be electrically charged and the charge on it would vary based upon the incoming tones intense intensity from your radio or over the telephone lines so the stronger the tone the higher the electric charge and when the electric charge was high enough on that needle it would burn a line into the paper so the higher the tone the higher the charge the darker the line and the drum would rotate and as that drum rotated once around the needle would move over slightly down the page just just one scan line and then the drum would rotate around you know another turn and then you needle would move over and so you would build an image line by line by line as the needle moved down that paper now the the fax transmission sounds like a swooping tone with a solid high-pitched tone and a tick tick tick tick going on on a much lower frequency and that tick-tick-tick is a sync pulse that would be the equivalent of one rotation of the drum in the old mechanical fax machines now facsimile is still in use today it's primarily used commercially by government and weather service sites like our NOAA here in the United States they have stations that broadcast weather maps information satellite images via fax on the HF spectrum and we're going to receive some of that today now let me pull up a couple of websites to show you first off blackcat systems who makes scanning software has a nice page on receiving these fixed simile images with some information and some broadcast schedules for various weather marine stations now they only have a few but they have the broadcast times and descriptions of what they're going to be transmitting so it's kind of a useful page I'll put this down in the link or the video description down below but there's also a document published by NOAA under this link OS slash marine slash our FAQs dot PDF and this PDF file is sort of a complete listing of all of the stations around the globe in different countries that are broadcasting weather facts data and in each each case like here's Tokyo Japan they have complete schedules of what they're transmitting what frequencies they're gonna be on so this is a really great document it's updated pretty regularly this update I think was in September so several times a year but here we go Boston Massachusetts USA callsign of the station the various frequencies at broadcasts on what times they broadcast on those frequencies and then a complete breakdown of what they're going to send and when they're going to send it so like here's satellite image will be sent at 21:51 Zulu or UTC so you can you know see what's out there to copy so anyway what does it sound like well I just happen to have the SDR running right now and there's a fax transmission that we're receiving from New Orleans and there you can hit leave a cake pitch continuous and here tick tick tick that's the same place so how did we be paired it LFL digi one of the more popular programs with all the different modes it has in it also has under op mode let me move this up away from my camera there we go under op mode we fax right there now you'll see that there are two choices IOC 576 and IOC 288 and I think that has to do with the number of scan lines per page or image and 576 is the format that most ala Marine broadcasts use so if I select that you'll see the controls here change these are our different controls for receiving faxes now I'm going to enable the audio on the SDR you can see salut and Saturday and it should figure out the Jews even factionist abdicate thanks now you should be able to hear me talking over the for the fax machine I hope that wasn't too terrible before so anyway was I saying slant and the early fax machines as I said both drums at the sending and the receiving side had to be going at the same speed right they had to be in sync well we're not using mechanical devices but even our computers will have slight differences in timing you know they're not gonna be kicking off clock cycles at exactly the same rates so even though we're hearing a pulse and we're knowing that we're doing a scan line there's gonna be a little bit of error we might be scanning a little too far a little too short and what you'll end up with is a slant where each line is crawling a little bit more and more over to the side so this slant adjustment here lets you compensate for that I've had to move this up a bit to get rid of I had really bad slant earlier this adjustment might have to be made per station because each station's sending machine is gonna have slightly different clock timing right so you're gonna get a slant so I might want to write down when I get this straight I might want to write down that slant number and associate it with Louisiana station in a log so that I know if I'm gonna receive faxes from Louisiana that's the slant that I want to use so that's an adjustment you might have to make this little button here automatic image centering in theory what that should do is after the image is received is it should shift it all over so that this black bar is on the right so the image is centered in the picture we can adjust that alignment here manually there we go nope it wants to put it there right well I'm gonna do this yeah that's why I want it so that's what a line does noise is a noise filter I should turn that on because you can see where the noise is creating all these grittiness yeah there we go that's much better that noise filter will get rid of those speckles and give you a cleaner image now once we've reached the end of the image FL digi will save it and it'll it'll report in this box here where it saved the file there's a default location that you can change in the programs settings but it's gonna save the images out for you and then you can go and they'll be they'll be a regular PNG file you can do whatever you want with them so video okay so there you go FL digi does pretty well at decoding fax images huh you can see I've still got a little slant going on I need to move this even further let's try about 47 see how that does I'll get that right there are other facts programs and some of them do auto slant adjustment I don't know why he hasn't done that in FL digi given that we have this nice black bar it should be easy for the program to figure out where our slant is and straighten it out I'm still slant in just a bit now I don't know what I'm receiving here let's see we are maybe second look at the schedule cantide Boston Massachusetts is out I'm listening to know I'm just going to Louisiana oops New Orleans okay and it is 1842 so we are looking at 48 hour wave periodic and swell direction prediction you know that must be what all these little arrows are the direction and the swell size of the waves I can see the up key that's Panama and that's South America of course that makes sense this is New Orleans isn't it so they're gonna Center their map around the ocean area that's near them pretty neat huh propagations a little up and down today but I hope you found this interesting and if you have FL digi go out and decode some some weather facts it's kind of neat to see what's going on in the oceans thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video don't forget to give it a thumbs up also if you're not already a subscriber click to subscribe join us on the Facebook channel for discussion about the videos and if you'd like to help support this channel please click to support me on my patreon page