On Halloween, I had a blast listening to pirate radio stations, mostly Radio Genix and Outhouse Radio One of the neat things was they had intermittent SSTV mixed in with their music, and I recieved many cool Halloween-themed pictures. Pumkins, ghosts, and so on. The ones from Outhouse Radio were just really cool pictures, hard to describe. Luckily, I recorded it! All was well, until one day last week I left MMSSTV running with my radio tuned to 14.

On Halloween, I was listening to pirate radio! I recorded the audio, this is mostly me flipping between Radio Genix and Outhouse Radio, but also occasionally scanning around to see if any new stations were popping up: You can hear SSTV all over, just clicking around I hear some at 16 minutes, and around 50 minutes. Here’s what happens if you play that audio into MMSSTV or QSSTV or the iOS app SSTV or countless others:

The first time I heard a time station broadcasting the time, I thought “wouldn’t it be useful if my computer could set its clock off that?” So, I did some digging into it. ntpd, the network time protocol daemon, has several little-documented features, and it turns out using the audio signal from WWV/H or CHU is one of them, but the code is very old and written for OSS and not ALSA, let alone PulseAudio.