Horus Telemetry Test Launch – Sunday 29th July 11AM CST

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UPDATE: Unfortunately the payload failed at approximately 9km altitude. It recovered on descent just prior to landing, and we were able to get a landing location. Ivan VK5HS and Peter VK5PE were able to recover the payload from the middle of a large field south of Loxton.

Thanks to all that decoded the initial part of the flight. If you could please e-mail your log files through as mentioned below that would be appreciated.

This coming Sunday, the 29th of July, Project Horus will be performing a small balloon launch from Mt Barker High School Oval, at approximately 11AM CST. Live flight tracking will be available on the HabHub online tracker as usual.

This launch is another test flight of the new ‘Horus Binary’ telemetry payload, which uses a new modulation mode developed by David Rowe VK5DGR and Mark Jessop VK5QI with 6dB better performance than the usual RTTY telemetry. The first flight of this new payload was on the Horus 49 (Anstey 2.0) flight, where it performed well!

A modified Vaisala RS41, which transmits the new Horus Binary telemetry

The aim of this flight is to provide another opportunity for listeners to attempt decoding of this mode. Like the RTTY telemetry, the Horus Binary telemetry can be received using a 70cm Single-Sideband receiver. Telemetry will be on 434.640 MHz USB (+/- temperature drift). This will be the only payload on this flight, and we are not intending on recovering the payload (though others are welcome to go after it!).

Decoding of the the new mode is not supported in dl-fldigi, and hence new software must be installed – a guide on how to install and run the required Horus Binary decoder software is available here.  (A note to those listeners that decoded the binary payload on Horus 49: a few new features have been added to the Habitat uploader utility – please update to the latest version!)

To help debug some issues that were encountered on the last flight, it would be appreciated if all listeners e-mailed the ‘telemetry.log’ and ‘horusb_debug.log’ log files (created by the horusbinary uploader) through to Mark VK5QI (vk5qi@rfhead.net) at the conclusion of the flight.