I'm normally pretty good about writing close to length, but the first draft of this 950-word article was over 2,000 words long. :) I only get three pages per issue though, so even though sometimes it's painful deciding what lore to leave out, it has to be done :)
Original article author here: Yes, key pages were multiple times over teletext. It's a bit of a grey area for amateur radio regs, so I didn't mention it in the article, but you could use the software with say, an license-free part 15 short wave FM transmitter, to send an entire carousel of many pages. As such the code does have an option to flag ket pages and specify how many times they should be repeated over a carousel's broadcast.
Original article author here: There's isn't anything on the wider web about this project because it is a bespoke creation for IEEE Spectrum's Hands On column! If you're not familiar with the column, it's always written at a pretty high level. That said, I will be putting all the code up on a public repo, once I get a chance (hopefully very soon!) to verify a cold install on a fresh machine does work.
Author of the OP article here: Yes, you could 100% send teletext frames over meshtastic: if you're using the unlicensed bands you could even send full carousels with many pages, which is something that isn't really kosher under my reading of the FCC regs for amateur radio, which is why I stuck to a single page SSTV replacement in the article!
Thank you, I'm glad you agree they are nice! The artist is James Provost, he's done most of the illustrations for Hands On since we switched over from photography a few years ago (I'm the IEEE Spectrum editor responsible for the column).
I'm the editor of Spectrum's "Hands On" DIY column: thank you so much! The general goal is to have projects that can be done in a weekend or three for less than roughly $300 and which point to something interesting beyond just the build itself. A lot of credit has to go to David Schneider who is the author of this piece, and has contributed many of Spectrum's citizen science projects.
BTW, If you want to see just the DIY projects instead of all our DIY-related coverage (which can include e.g. interviews or news articles) another handy link is:
The back end we use for article infographics on the Spectrum website is from a company called Flourish, so anything that looks like it's from them is actually editorial content.
We used to roll our own Javascript for the Top Programming Languages, which e.g. computed rankings on the fly, but it became unwieldy to maintain, and readers didn't take advantage of things like the ability to set their own weightings. So we shifted to pre-computing the rankings three years ago, and use a specialized tool for straight visualization.
Ugh, should be fixed. Another transfer problem that always has to be catched manually. I've been putting articles online since the mid-1990s, and in 30 fecking years of watching ever more elaborate text processing, DTP, web and content systems evolve from hand-assembled HTML 2 through homebrew content-management systems to CSS/HTML 5 and the fancy commercial CMSs of today, and desktop processor speeds go from 66 MHz to 3 GHz, we still can't reliably guarantee things like italics or superscripts will automatically go all the way through from word processor to browser.
I honestly thought that problem would be solved way before e.g. automated interview transcription...
Congrats on being an early reader, b/c I spotted this on a fresh read Monday morning and zapped it! [I'm a IEEE Spectrum editor] This is a problem that's got me the odd time before—when you've read an article so many times, and something somehow gets duped in the transfer to the online content management system, it's easy not to notice because you think you just lost focus for a second and your eye jumped back to re-reading the same paragraph, not that it's actually the same para twice. You get as many eyes as possible on articles to prevent this from happening, but every now and then something slips through, especially when you have a very atypical layout and structure compared to our regular articles, because focusing on those things is stealing cycles. So that one's on me!
For reals, we thought about putting one in, although the blobs and spires would have been the payload in the center of a solar sail, but we couldn't squeeze it in! [I'm an IEEE Spectrum editor :) ]
Thanks! I have notes scattered around, but they're not coherent (unlike the RTLs! <rimshot>) and I doubt I'll have time to publish them as once I've written an article I generally have to move on the next thing, which is the downside of being allowed to play with nice toys.
Yes, the United States has a you-can-recieve-anything philosophy (with some limits for old analog cellphone frequencies, and restrictions on using, e.g. a police scanner in a car) that isn't matched in many other countries, which is the legal basis of how Ireland and the U.K. require you to buy a license to watch over-the-air television.
Sorry if I didn't make this clearer in the article due to space constraints, but the TV surveillance antenna gives me a fair degree of directionality, enough to distinguish planes on different LGA and JFK approach/departures paths as they move through different parts of the sky, although once you get within 90 degrees of the reference signal all is lost. You also get a velocity and a range, albeit a bistatic one, similar to the first U.K. Chain Home radar stations.