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Pre-flight preparations continue
Pre-flight preparations continue
Our "launch window" for the balloon flight is Friday 29-Aug to Sunday 7-Sep.
The forecast conditions for Monday & Tuesday are good for a flight heading NE towards the Pennines and our CAA permission is good for any day in the week:
In the meantime, the beacon is on test on 144.091MHz, from G4AQB's QTH in Breightmet.
It now includes live temperature and pressure readings, encoded as integer values:
CQ DE G0BWC G0BWC QRPP BEACON TEST DE G0BWC IN IO83 TEMP 2560 PRES 102464
(this example indicates 25.6 Celsius and 1024.64 millibars).
Check the PSK Reporter for where and when it was "last heard".
This is one of the Arduino Nano projects which Steve G4AQB built and demonstrated for us last year. It uses an Si5351 synthesizer to generate just 10mW at the bottom end of of the 2m band. With a crystal for its reference (not a TCXO), it's not stable enough for WSPR, but fine for CW reception (when the operator can manually tune in their receiver). The external board is a low-pass filter which Steve has added to reduce any residual 3rd-harmonic energy (which would appear in the 70cm band).
During tests in July and August, it was received over 50km away, but now we're planning to put it somewhere where it can be heard much more widely: thanks to local private High-Altitude Balloon enthusiast (and new BWC member) Nick McCloud, we’re aiming to send it up into the stratosphere. The beacon hardware weighs just a few tens of grammes and will be powered from a 6V Lithium battery pack and carried in a polystyrene box under the balloon.
The beacon will be transmitting just 10mW into a vertical dipole. If you receive its signal, please send us your report using the form below.
You can decode its ~15 WPM Morse using the Fldigi program and even use this to post a report to the PSK Reporter site. Note that the location of the beacon shown on this map is the Club's QTHR, rather than its current position. Here are some tips on setting up Fldigi to send PSK Reports.
As well as the 2m Amateur beacon, the flight will also be transmitting 2FSK (fast RTTY) and LoRa (frequency-chirp spread-spectrum) in the 434 MHz licence-exempt Low-Power Devices band, sending telemetry and slow-scan pictures. These UHF signals are picked up and forwarded by a network of Distributed Listeners, so you can follow the flight in real-time via the SondeHub Amateur site and watch the SSDV pictures coming in. There’s also a Grafana page which displays all the telemetry from the flight.
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