Scanline Studio

SSTV for amateur radio

Slow-scan TV on Windows, Linux and macOS

Scanline Studio sends and receives SSTV pictures over amateur radio. Build a QSL-style card once and reuse it for every contact. Every picture you receive goes into a searchable history linked to your logbook. All 43 MMSSTV-family modes work, so you can swap pictures with stations already using them. It also sends and receives HamDRM, the digital picture mode of EasyPal and QSSTV. It's a rewrite of YONIQ, the MMSSTV fork.

Download View on GitHub

Free and open source for Windows, Linux and macOS

Scanline Studio decoding a Martin M1 picture recorded off the air, sped up 5×. It picked out the mode by itself.

A template editor for QSL-style pictures

Set a layout up once, then reuse it whenever you need it, even in the middle of a contact.

  • Text, box, image and line elements. Each one has its own style, stacking order and position on the canvas.
  • Macros fill in your callsign, grid square and the current frequency and mode.
  • Ready Rack is a strip of nine pinned slots for quick recall. It sits on top of a searchable Template Library that you can view as a grid or a list.
  • Your existing YONIQ .mtm templates import directly.
  • Distort boxes and images in perspective, and let text grow to fill its box.

All 43 modes

Each one was checked against YONIQ's own encoder and decoder code, so a picture sent from Scanline Studio decodes on other MMSSTV-family stations, and theirs decode here.

Martin M1 / M2 Scottie S1 / S2 / DX Robot 36 / 72 PD 50–290 Pasokon P3 / P5 / P7 MP / MR / ML MN / MC (narrow) and more

Plus HamDRM

HamDRM sends the picture as a JPEG 2000 file, compatible with EasyPal and QSSTV. Every mode, bandwidth and QAM level was tested against the real QSSTV application in both directions, and every file arrived byte-identical.

Mode A / B / E 2.2 / 2.5 kHz 4 / 16 / 64-QAM Robust / Normal / Fast profiles

Radio control through Hamlib, rigctld, flrig and OmniRig

Control your radio from the program with whichever backend fits your setup. Hamlib supports many transceivers, where YONIQ had its own serial code for a fixed list of rigs plus OmniRig on Windows.

  • Linked Hamlib has the widest choice of radios and needs no extra program running.
  • rigctld lets several programs share one rig, on this machine or over your network.
  • flrig and OmniRig (Windows only), if you already use them.
  • A slow radio never freezes the decoder.

What works depends on the backend you pick. For example, flrig and OmniRig can't set the filter bandwidth, and direct serial access can fail while another program holds the port. The user guide has the details.

Also included

Audio recording

You can save each reception's raw audio as a .wav file next to its picture and re-decode it later.

Logbook and QRZ

You can export ADIF, forward logged QSOs over UDP to GridTracker2, N1MM and Log4OM, and look up station details on QRZ.

Languages and themes

The interface comes in English and German, with more languages planned, and in light and dark themes. Change either in Options.

Coming from YONIQ?

Your .mtm templates import with the Import legacy button in the template library, and the importer flags anything it can't carry over. Your YONIQ settings file doesn't import, so you'll need to enter your settings again. Nearly every YONIQ setting has a counterpart in Options.

Download

Scanline Studio is currently in beta. Releases are on GitHub, and the user guide opens right here on this page.

Latest release

  • Send and receive HamDRM digital pictures, compatible with EasyPal and QSSTV
  • Calling-frequency menu in the header for SSTV and HamDRM
  • Separate TX power levels for SSTV and HamDRM
  • A failed settings load no longer erases your settings, and a backup is kept. See the release notes for details.

The releases page has a file for Windows, Linux (x64, glibc 2.34 or newer, for example Ubuntu 22.04 or Debian 12) and macOS (Apple Silicon, macOS 14 or newer). To go on the air you need a radio and a sound card connected to it, and rig control is optional. No radio handy? Open a saved .wav recording and decode that.

Download
Older releases User guide Source code

About Scanline Studio

Why this exists

MMSSTV goes back to 2000, and YONIQ is a fork of it. Both only run on Windows, and Linux hams have had QSSTV instead. Scanline Studio brings the MMSSTV family to Windows, Linux and macOS and keeps what goes out over the air exactly the same.

It's free and open source, under GPL-3.0-or-later. The YONIQ/MMSSTV code it grew out of is LGPL-3.0-or-later.

How it's built

Scanline Studio is developed with heavy use of AI-assisted engineering (Claude Code), which helped with the C++ to C# port. The AI doesn't decide what's correct, though: every mode is checked against YONIQ's own code. How it's tested, with a worked example.

Found a mismatch or a bug?

If a mode decodes differently from MMSSTV or YONIQ, or sends something another station can't read, that's a bug. The same goes for anything else that doesn't work the way you'd expect. Please open an issue.