Digital Amateur TV experiment between Belgium and Greece on the 29 MHz band - Nov 2025

Radio amateurs have been sending and receiving TV signals for a number of decades. First it was analogue TV and that became digital TV in more recent years.

With the advent of digital TV or digital amateur TV (DATV) to give it its full title, radio amateurs have been resourceful in squeezing video signals in smaller and smaller bandwidths. This has resulted in signals being several hundred kHz wide instead of several MHz.

During tests on 29.400 MHz in November of 2025, Stavros SV1EBS in Athens, Greece managed to receive the DATV signals from Frans, ON4VVV in Belgium, a distance of about 2124 kms.

The path which was most likely via a single F2 layer hop off the ionosphere was the first reception of a DATV signal from Belgium in Greece.

The image above contains some screenshots of the signal from ON4VVV. The image below is a screenshot from the YouTube video from SV1EBS. It shows the MiniToune software and I have highlighted the received signal from ON4VVV in red.

Technical details... For this experiment, ON4VVV was using a homemade Portsdown TX with a mini Lime SDR and a Rasberry Pi to generate the D-ATV signals. The format used was DVB-S2 with a symbol rate of 125 kilo-symbols per second (125 kS/s) with Forward Error Correction (FEC) of a ½. The data rate was 250 kilobits/sec.

The D-ATV signal bandwidth on 29.4 MHz was about 150 kHz and Frans was running 400-watts from a homemade power amplifier to a 4-element mono-band beam at 19 metres above ground level.

On the receive side, SV1EBS in Athens was using a simple dipole for 10m with an upconverter in front of his “minitiouner”. It's worth noting that this basic set up resulted in a successful reception of the D-ATV signals. There is plenty of scope for improvements with the addition of a directional beam with gain, a pre-amplifier and a bandpass filter.

Frans, ON4VVV writes... "This signal was demodulated by the minitiouner into a colour picture with strength indicator between D1 and D4. This means that he had between 1 and 4 dB of spare power in RX.  

A second test was done with DVB-S2 and symbol rate of 250 kS/s and this was  demodulated into a picture for only a short time."

The video clip below is from SV1EBS which shows reception of the D-ATV signal on the 9th of November 2025. Note that the test card that is being received is video and not a single static image.

Second test on the 16th of November... One week later, some more tests were carried out and the signals were even stronger. 

Fran writes... "Exactly one week later we did the same test in DVB-S2 with SR 125ks and FEC ½ because maybe we had been simply lucky that first time. Again SV1EBS could demodulate my signal but this time up to D8 meaning a real strong signal with up to 8dB spare RX signal

We decided to switch over to SR 250ks with my camera connected and again it produced a picture , but this time a moving picture from my camera. Both connections have been demodulated during tens of minutes."

A video of the second test can be seen below...

Analysis... While this may seem at first to be just the reception of a low resolution video, it's a significant achievement.

First, there is the challenge of reducing the bandwidth of a video signal from MHz to just 150 kHz and the guys in the ATV community have been doing this successfully. The second part is the challenge of trying to receive a D-ATV signal off the ionosphere.

When you listen to someone on a narrow band mode like SSB, you can hear the audio and the signal strength changes over time i.e. there's fading. This is often due to the signal arriving in phase and out of phase as it comes back down off different parts of the ionosphere. In other words, the path length is changing.

When you look at a D-ATV signal coming from someone a few kms away, you'd see a nice clean signal on the waterfall display. When the D-ATV signals comes down off the ionosphere, it looks something like this...

The dark diagonal streaks are where the signal is being cancelled out. It starts at the higher frequency and as the conditions change over time, the 'notch' moves lower in frequency as the longer wavelength signals cancel out.

As you might imagine, losing big chunks of the digital video signal plays havoc with reception.

Future tests... ON4VVV is looking trying for a trans-Atlantic reception report. Frans writes... "I am sure that transmitting D-ATV from EU to USA must be possible and demodulated into a moving picture too, but all my efforts to find somebody over there with a decent antenna to receive me was in vain."

Anyone in the USA or Canada interested now that we're still near the peak of the sunspot cycle and conditions on 10m are still good?

Links...

1) Previous report about a successful DATV test on 29 MHz across the North Atlantic - 7th Nov 2022

2) More information about the proposed Amateur TV experiments at 29.250 MHz & 51.7 MHz 

Successful Digital Amateur TV tests on the 29 MHz band across the North Atlantic - 7th Nov 2022

Back in December of 2021, I had a post titled "More information about the proposed Amateur TV experiments at 29.250 MHz & 51.7 MHz" up on the blog and it received quite a lot of interest.

On the 7th of November 2022, Rob M0DTS managed to send a TV signal on 29.250 MHz across the North Atlantic!

First off, some information. The map above shows the path... M0DTS is located in the NE of England and he was using an online Kiwi Software Defined Radio (SDR) which was located in the state of Pennsylvania.

Rob was transmitting his Digital Amateur TV signal on 29.250 MHz using 100-watts into a 3-element Yagi. The Kiwi SDR in the USA was using a simple loop antenna for reception of the signals. As the SDR was online, Rob was able to log in and see if his DATV transmissions were being received.

The initial tests were done on the 6th of November as can be seen from the screen capture above. 

On the left are the SSB signals the Kiwi SDR was receiving down around 28.5 MHz. On the right, you can see some FM signals up around 29.6 MHz. Rob's DATV signal can be clearly seen at 29.250 MHz.

M0DTS writes... "Been watching my 29.250MHz DATV test signal on a kiwisdr in Pennsylvania... there is hope! This was 66Ks DVB-S2, Lots of frequency fading but on peaks maybe it will just work in DVB-S2... I can also do DVB-T, but today was just gauging signal strengths."

There's a lot of information in that waterfall display if we examine it closely. First off, left to right is frequency and up and down is time.

The path for this experiment was about 5,500 kms in length and probably involved two hops off the F2 layer in the ionosphere. Sometimes the signals arrive in phase and appear strong, sometimes the signals are out of phase and cancel each other out.

As the DATV signal is spread out over 80 kHz, the higher frequency part of the DATV signal has a slightly shorter wavelength than the lower frequency and longer wavelength part.

What's fascinating is that you can see in the DATV waveform where the signal is being cancelled out. It starts at the higher frequency and as the conditions change over time, the 'notch' moves lower in frequency as the longer wavelength signals cancel out.

As you might imagine, losing big chunks of the digital video signal plays havoc with reception.

Back in the 'old days'.. say the 1970's and 1980's, there were times during the peak of the sunspot cycle when broadcast TV signals around 45-55 MHz were seen around the world. At the time of course, it was analogue TV but the F2 signals were noted for being highly distorted as different parts of the signal were missing.

Anyway, I digress :o)

On the 7th of November, Rob managed to successfully send an amateur TV signal across the Atlantic when the signals were stronger.

M0DTS writes..."Today's quick 10m test across the pond. Txing 18Ks DVB-S 2/3 -> receiving IQ signal output from kiwisdr into sdrangel then demodulated, note the kiwisdr has 20KHz bandwidth limitation. So DVB-S is possible over HF path when fading allows :-) "

In conclusion: On the face of it, sending a signal across the North Atlantic on the 10m band is no big deal. It has been done countless times on CW, SSB, FT8, FM, etc. 

It's not the same as say Slow Scan TV (SSTV) where a single image is sent over SSB. What makes this significant is that it's actual video. 

The amateur TV community have been experimenting for the last few years trying to compress television signals into smaller and smaller bandwidths. In the UK, they're been doing this at 71 MHz, at 146 MHz and the higher amateur radio bands.

With the improving conditions on the HF bands, experiments like this are now a possibility on bands like 29 MHz and perhaps in time at 51 MHz as the sunspot cycle improves.