Amateur Television - pie in the sky
The BATC website says: Amateur Television is a fascinating area of Amateur Radio covering all aspects of video production, editing, transmission and reception of Television and has always been at the fore front of the technology revolution. Many stations are now transmitting Digital pictures (DATV) using the DVB broadcast standards and using video streaming technologies to exchange pictures with ATV operators around the world.
Es’hail-2 - Copyright © eshailsat
Perhaps it was that which caught my attention and I have found myself being drawn into this crazy passtime. However, there is a problem - at least for me. It's not that I'm an Apple fan boy, it's just that when I did jump ship it was like opening thick net curtains - I could suddenly see clearly why I'd become so frustrated with Microsoft. So instead of doing what most other HAMs do, I decided to stick with my principles and write my own software - for Mac.
Reinventing the wheel has turning out to be harder than I first thought, and it's been years since I wrote anything. I'd begun by seeing if I could write a Python app with an DATV oriented GUI. That was really easy and didn't take long, but it looked like something from the early 70's. Then I heard Apple was pushing their new open source Swift programming language, so I jumped on board with SwiftUI and SwiftNIO and that's where I am now.
The goal is to design and build a system with all the hardware installed on the roof of my apartment, and control and monitor everything over my local area network from an elegantly modern UI running on a Mac. Pie in the sky? Time will tell. I may even push one or two things up to GitHub as I progress, but I doubt there'll be much interest.