HamFax is an application for sending and receiving facsimilies in amateur radio. You can either use a sound card as interface to the transceiver or a SCS-PTC-II. Receiving of weather facsimile broadcasts is also possible.
The program is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See http://hamfax.sourceforge.net/ for further information and new releases.
Facsimiles are pictures which are transmitted line by line. The sending and receiving station have to agree on the transmission speed (LPM stands for lines per minute) and the IOC (index of cooperation) which corresponds the line width. The information transmitted is the brightness of the current position.
The beginning of a transmission is marked with a APT start signal (APT stands for automatic picture transmission). Usually this is a black/white pattern which changes between black and white at 300Hz.
Facsimiles on short wave are frequency modulated, that means the frequency of the carrier is changing with the transmitted information (the current brightness). Usually the deviation is 400Hz, so the frequency for white is 800Hz higher than the one for black.
For information about stations broadcasting weather maps, see the program's homepage.
For receiving facsimiles from a weather satellite a suitable FM receiver is needed. The output of this receiver is a amplitude modulated signal where the maximum amplitude corresponds to white and no amplitude means black.
You can either use a SCS PTC-II as modulator and demodulator or connect a sound card to your transceiver. For the PTC refer to the manual, especially the chapter about interfacing transceiver, PTC and computer. When using a sound card you need to connect line-out to the microphone input (or something similar) of the transceiver and line-in to some output of the transceiver. The RTS signal of a serial port can be used to key the PTT as it is often use for PSK31. A simple transistor is often enough to do the job.
For both interfaces you have to switch your transceiver to USB (upper side band). In HamFax set carrier to 1900kHz and tune your transceiver 1900kHz below the desired frequency.
Set deviation, modulation apt start and stop frequencies, lpm, the type of phasing lines (normal or inverted) and the mono/color switch to the appropriate values. Then choose the desired interface in the receive menu and see what happens. :)
If the apt start tone is not detected properly or you missed it you can skip it by clicking the skip button. If you missed the phasing lines you can skip the phasing detection and the value from the lpm checkbox is used.
While receiving the raw data is stored in memory. So it is possible to correct the received image with the menu items in the Image menu. The image can be saved in any format supported by Qt.
Load the image from somewhere. Then set the control items to the desired values and scale the image to the desired IOC. Just select the right item from the transmit menu and you are on the way.