SSTV - And a Trip Back to the 1970s

I started playing with SSTV the other day.  Far from being anything like TV, the whole mode seems to be more like analogue file transfer, mediated by digital computers.

Within minutes, I was receiving admirably good quality images from across the EU, with the odd one from south America.  There's something undeniably interesting about SSTV and its digital (and more error-free) counterpart.  But there's one thing I found really unappealing.

One of the more tasteful female images on SSTV.  Others are a bit more, well, revealing...

Images of naked women.  Lots of them!

SSTV indeed seems to be the amateur radio equivalent, for the most part, of a private top shelf channel.  Naked women, scantily-clad ones, fully dressed attractive ones, and ones draped over cars.  They're all here in abundance.

Lord knows what kick anyone gets out of sending such images to one another over radio, and maybe that's why there only seems to be a small, if you'll pardon the pun, hardcore of SSTV operators.  Some do reciprocate my own interests in non-female imagery, and send a sexy picture of a helicopter or aircraft.  But they're not common.

This kind of thing harks back well into the dark ages of 1970s Britain, where sexism was rampant.  It tells us of the ageing population of the radio community, reflects on some rather slow-to-change nations and their attitudes to women and, of course, entirely lacks any female input for lack of any female operators. 

Time and again people wring their hands and wonder why so few people are taking up an interest in the hobby.  Here's yet another glaringly-obvious reason, especially if you happened to be a younger operator, or a woman, or both - none of which seems to bother any of the senders of daily red-top newspaper images that ply their way across the airwaves.