We are Werner, PE1OBW and David, PE1MUD.
We have a slightly different technical background. When we worked for the same employer, I think for some 15 years or so, we made some awesome projects together using various techniques. Audio and video – both compressed and uncompressed – over fiber and over IP (streaming). Software, embedded stuff using microcontrollers and FPGA’s and some plain analog hardware, too. Oh, and some power supply stuff as well. Too much to mention really. Our knowledge partly overlaps but our strength is in what we can achieve together and how we communicate. We complement each other really well and this enables us to achieve much more than we could by ourselves.
One of the coolest amateur modes, we think, is FM amateur television (FM-ATV). Hence the name of this site.
It’s about using higher frequency bands and more complex technologies. It’s a challenging hobby and to boot you can make nice QSO’s with (nowadays low quality) analog video and high quality audio, both in FM and in NICAM.
For FM-ATV we want to make a number of projects to put some glamour back into this old mode and renew its usability. To bring it back from the dead, so to speak. We want to achieve this using digital techniques and we have set a goal to make some designs that are simply without any form of compromise. Broadcast quality, so to speak.
Why? Because it’s fun, and because we can. And because we don’t like the latency of D-ATV in duplex setups. Yes, Werner did develop one of the first D-ATV transmitters available for amateur use, but we never felt it really caught on, mainly due to audio latency.
The first project that will be described here is the Digital Baseband that we developed. Well, that is working but also still in development, a little bit. We’re almost done 🙂
Here is an image of a first version of the digital baseband board, from 2019:
This board started it’s life with the plan to make a “Timebase corrected Video Denoiser” for FM-ATV reception, but in the end it became a digital baseband. That “TBC Video Denoiser” is still on our list…
The picture doesn’t show the FPGA board that sits on top of the headers. That board quickly became obsolete when the parts shortages started (corona years). Also missing is the Arduino controller that controlled everything and drives the TFT screen (als not shown).
73!
Werner & David