PS-7 is planned to be release early Sunday morning 11 May (Mother’s day!).

Details:

Party foil balloon.
Solar powered payload 10mW, 12g weight.
APRS 145.175Mhz, callsign VK3YT-10

THOR16: 434.650Mhz with RSID, every 6 minutes, call sign is PS on spacenear.us. Flight PS-7

Balloon is expected to travel north to NSW.

Aim: Testing of long range solar powered PICO payload, and manual tracking with FEC (Forward Error Correction) and RSID identification.

Update #1 8:30am AEST 11 May 2014

Balloon in the air

Update #2 6:40pm AEST 12 May 2014

The balloon made it to Newcastle, before heading East into the Tasman sea.
The two balloons in the picture are for the same balloon, one for APRS tracker and one for THOR16 tracker.

Total distance travelled 1111km

Update #3 7:00am AEST 14 May 2014

The balloon got to New Zealand this morning, and appeared to have landed

First and last packet from NZ

2014-05-14 01:37:52 EST: VK3YT-10>SV48Q6,WIDE2-1,qAR,ZL1GK:`f+7r<0x1d>FO/#1R}26,9,3,6,-45,3325,0202

2014-05-14 04:14:12 EST: VK3YT-10>SX03R4,WIDE2-1,qAR,ZL1GK:`g4vm&[O/”?G}52,6,3,6,3,4090,0201

Total distance so far is 3083km.

Update #4 8:00am AEST 15 May 2014

Looks like the balloon decided it didn’t want to stay in NZ for too long.
It re-launched itself this morning, before NZ hams (and customs) could get to it

A big thanks for ZL hams who all geared up to search for the balloon, even with planes!

That was 24H of rest!