Tag Archives: pico

PS-5 – PICO floater MEL-SYD-QLD with RTTY and APRS

PICOSPACE-5 is planned for release at around 4-5pm 2-3pm Sat 26/4/14 from Melbourne.
It will be a PICO party balloon floating north from Melbourne to Sydney and possibly will reach QLD.

Details:

12g payload
434.650Mhz, USB
10mW, dipole antenna
100baud RTTY, 425Hz shift, ASCII 8,None,1

Altitude: 7000-8000m

RTTY callsign PS

RTTY tracking with dl-fldigi on http://spacenear.us as PS-5.
Assistance with manually tracking on RTTY is greatly appreciated.

Software for tracking is here:
http://ukhas.org.uk/projects:dl-fldigi

Setup instructions:
http://ukhas.org.uk/guides:tracking_guide

You will need a SSB receiver that can receive 434.650Mhz.

There will be a 30 second gap between groups of 3 RTTY transmissions.

The payload will also send APRS packets every ~8 minutes on 145.175Mhz.
APRS callsign is VK3YT-11

Will be in #highaltitude chatroom on irc.freenode.net
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=highaltitude

The aim of the flight is to try out both APRS and RTTY on a new tracker, and to see how we can complement manual tracking with APRS.

New tracker:
1g lighter than its brother

Photo

Updated Prediction:

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Update 1: 5pm 26/4.

Released at 2pm, The balloon has been going well, APRS works fine, we had some heavy fading on RTTY but it seems to settle down now.

Balloon is heading towards Sydney, it does look like there should be enough coverage for RTTY reception until Sydney.

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Update 2: 9am 27/4
Passing Newcastle, balloon is going slow at 24km/h, ready to turn left. Still being tracked by VK2 team.

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Updated prediction shows it will get to Rockhamton in 40+ hours. The battery might have been flat by then 🙁

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Update 3: 1:50pm 27/4

Looks like we had the last transmission via APRS at 1:01pm AEST.

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Total travelled distance 1072km

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