Preparations are continuing to fly a large helium balloon this coming Sunday from Mt Barker in South Australia. AREG will be flying the balloon on behalf of LaunchBox who are undertaking a schools science education program.

Lift-off is planned for 10am, with a flight path that currently looks like it will orbit the eastern Adelaide hills.

The only risk to the launch currently is the low level weather forecast. The Adelaide Hills area has received yet another significant rain band this evening. If this hasnt cleared by morning the flight start could be delayed. Watch this website for the latest news.

Predicted flight path, as per 2016-09-17 06Z GFS model. (5m/s ascent rate, 3.5m/s descent rate, 34km burst altitude)

Amateur Radio operators across SA and western Victoria as far east as Melbourne should be able to hear the telemetry transmissions on 434.650 MHz using 100 baud RTTY (7N2). If you decode the transmissions using the dl-flDigi program, you can contribute your received frames to the global pool of tracking data enabling us to follow the flight.

You can find a guide to tracking the balloon flight using the dl-fldigi software at the following link: https://ukhas.org.uk/guides:tracking_guide

As usual, the payloads can be tracked live on the Habhub Tracker, available here.

As an added bonus, this flight will be carrying an experimental payload transmitting 115kbaud FSK on 441.200MHz, downlinking live images from the payload. This payload has been in development by David Rowe (VK5DGR) and Mark Jessop (VK5QI) for some time, and utilises an open source modem stack. If all works as expected, images should appear on this page: http://ssdv.habhub.org/VK5QI