PS-16 MEL-ADELAIDE

PS-16 was released from Melbourne on 12/8/2014, and took a different path from other PS flights: towards Adelaide, South Australia.

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Details:

10mW TX, APRS on 145.175Mhz, callsign VK3YT-12
Olivia on 434.650Mhz, tracked on spacenear.us as PS.

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As of 5:30pm the balloon was travelling very slowly towards Ararat.

Update #1:

Wow that was the first PS trip to Adelaide from Melbourne, and the furthest west a PS Pico balloon has travelled. It is not very common to see such unusual wind pattern.

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Update #2:

PS-16 went in range Thurs afternoon

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Prediction for the next few days:

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Update #3: 7:30am Fri 15/8

PS-16 has done second pass of Adelaide and now will be heading back to Victoria

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Updated prediction:

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Update #4: 10:30am Sat 16/8

Looks like there were some changes in the wind pattern, the balloon did another loop around Adelaide

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Update #5: 5:30pm Sat 16/8

The balloon landed and was picked up by Bob VK5FO and Ray VK5RR.

The payload was on the wet grass which killed APRS transmissions, but they did a great job with locating and retrieving the payload, using a combination of DF and software decoding to track the UHF signal. Thanks guys!

Final decoded packet:

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