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Club News Summary

Horus 72 Flight Report – CSIRO Payload

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Horus 72 was a flight for CSIRO – the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation, and launched on Sunday the 14th of June 2026.

AREG had been approached by CSIRO a few months ago seeking to trial some sensor payloads on high-altitude balloon flights, and we were happy to get involved! This flight featured a thermal imaging payload intended for use on a future high altitude platform. A big thanks to CSIRO for choosing AREG for their high-altitude balloon launch needs!

Launch

The launch site weather was fairly calm, making for each launch preparations. For this launch we tried to keep the distances between payloads fairly long to avoid ‘interactions’ after balloon burst.

Thanks to Tim Bolton from CSIRO for capturing many great photos of the launch preparations:

There was a little bit of breeze around launch time, requiring a short ‘running launch’ to avoid the CSIRO payload impacting the ground. The launch was captured on video by Autumn VK5CLD:

You can see the CSIRO payload at the bottom of the string, with the large stabilisation vanes – these appeared to work quite well, and we may use this approach on our own payloads in the future!

Chase & Recovery

After launch the chase teams quickly got moving – the flight was predicted to be heading out somewhere near Lameroo and Pinnaroo, a good 2 hours drive away.

On the chase we had:

  • Mark VK5QI, Will VK5AHV and Autumn VK5CLD
  • Andy VK5AKH and Dennis VK5DEN
  • Liam VK5ALG
  • … and following us was Josh Pease from CSIRO!

The balloon burst at 28855m, and with a somewhat higher than expected descent rate, headed in for a landing about 10k south-west of Lameroo. The chase teams were able to get into position to watch the landing:

A short walk into the paddock, the payloads were all recovered in excellent condition! Most importantly, the CSIRO payload had a nice soft landing, with the thermal camera lens undamaged!

 

Horus 72 Flight Statistics

Launch Date:2026-06-14T00:51:06Z
Landing Date:2026-06-14T02:59:11Z
Launch Site:-35.07579, 138.85710
Landing Site:-35.36621, 140.41932
Distance Travelled:145 km
Maximum Altitude:28855 m

Horus 72 Flight Path

Wenet Imagery

This flight also included a test of a new Wenet payload camera – this time using a PiCameraHQ, with a M12 wide-angle lens. This payload captured nice and sharp (albeit quite fish-eyed) images all through the flight, and is looking to be a winner for future launches!

Thanks to the following stations for receiving imagery from the Wenet payload:

  • VK5ALG-9 (Mobile): 8727 packets (2.13 MB)
  • VK3TNU: 62196 packets (15.18 MB)
  • VK5AKH (Mobile): 118164 packets (28.85 MB)
  • VK5QI-9 (Mobile): 217515 packets (53.10 MB)
  • VK5KX-9: 232388 packets (56.74 MB)

A telemetry dashboard for the Wenet payload is available here: https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/goto/lwwoTnavg?orgId=1

Horus Binary Telemetry

We had a great showing of telemetry receiving stations on this flight, with many stations helping out receiving all three of the tracking payloads:

  • HORUS – BARC_RRR, Gum, VK3BKQ, VK5AI, VK5AKH, VK5AKK-H, VK5AKK-V, VK5ALG, VK5APR, VK5APR-9, VK5ARG, VK5BRL, VK5FD, VK5GA, VK5HW, VK5JPH, VK5KX, VK5KX-9, VK5NEX, VK5OCD, VK5QI-9, VK5QI-ChaseBox, VK5SFA/R, VK5ST-991, VK5TBD, VK5TRM, VK5ZAP, VK5ZAR, VK5ZM, VK5ZMD, VK5RK, vk5cv, vk5mhz, vk5zuc, webhorus-pdgl8b
  • VK5ARG – BARC_RRR, VK5AKH, VK5ALG, VK5ALG-9, VK5APR, VK5APR-9, VK5ARG, VK5BRL, VK5CV, VK5KX-9, VK5QI-9, VK5QI-ChaseBox, VK5SFA, VK5ST-991, VK5TBD,  VK5ZM
  • HORUS-2 – BARC_RRR, VK3BKQ, VK5ALG, VK5ARG, VK5BRL, VK5KX-9, VK5QI-9, VK5ST-991, VK5ZM

The longest distance reception was by VK3BKQ, at a distance of 543 km!

Telemetry dashboards for the Horus Binary payloads are available below:

– HORUS – https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/goto/vSVKTn-vg?orgId=1
– VK5ARG – https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/goto/os72o7-vg?orgId=1
– HORUS-2 – https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/goto/Q9C2o7aDg?orgId=1

Next Launches

Since this report took me a while to finish, we’ve already had one other balloon launch – Horus 73, on the 28th of June. You can find a mini-report for this flight here.

We’ll probably take a little break over Winter, as finding good launch days is quite difficult. Once we get into better weather, we expect to run the following launches:

  • Cross-Band Repeater re-flight, and more Wenet camera payload experiments.
  • Another LaunchBox launch for Fleet Space, hopefully including a 360Ëš Camera.
  • Possibly another launch for CSIRO.

Stay tuned!

 

Introducing Meshtastic & Meshcore LoraWAN Communications Systems – June 19th

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The next meeting of AREG will be held on Friday June 19th and will feature an introduction to the world of Meshtastic and Meshcore LoraWAN networking.

We will take you through what the networks are made of, what you can do with them and how to get involved.

This will occur down at our Clubrooms, at the Fulham Community Centre, off Phelps Court in Fulham. The meeting will start at 7.30pm with the doors open at 7.00pm.

Visitors are most welcome! We would love to meet you.

WIA VHF/UHF Winter Field Day – AREG Planned Activity Saturday 20th June

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AREG is pleased to announce that we hope to have a number of stations active during this year’s WIA Winter field day contest being held by the WIA over the weekend of June 20-21st 2026! At least 5 satations are expected to be active across most bands between 6m and 23cm, including portable activations from Ardrossan, Kulpara, Tarlee and Stirling as well as multiple home stations on the air as well!

We would love to see as many stations on the air on VHF/UHF Simplex in Adelaide during the contest so put it in your diary! Details of the contest can be found on the WIA Website. The event starts at 10:30 am ACST.

15th May Meeting: I’ve just received by Amateur Licence – what do I do next?

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Are you one of the hundreds of people who have decided now is the time to start your journey into the world of Amateur Radio? We have many newcomers gaining their qualifications every month. Many of those, once they have their licence, take a step back and then ask themselves the question – now where to start gettng my own station on air?

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At our May general meeting, we will have a panel of presenters take you through the process of working out where to begin, what to consider and how to get on the air from your own station.

We will introduce you to the various components you need to consider when getting on air on either the HF or VHF/UHF bands as well as highlight some activities where you can come along and find out more before taking the financial plunge yourself!

The meeting will be held at the Fulham Community Centre, on Phelps Court, Fulham, on Friday May 15th. Doors open at 7.00pm with the presentation starting at 7.30pm.

Visitors are most welcome!

Next Foxhunt: Saturday 4th July 2.00pm – North Park lands (New venue)

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The next AREG foxhunt will be held on Saturday 4th July at 2.00pm, starting from a new location in the north park lands, on Lefevre Road, North Adelaide.

This event has been delayed until June as AREG has a commitment to fly a Horus ballon on the 9th of May, and the June date would have clashed with the National Foxhunting Championships in Mt Gambier.

We look forward to seeing everyone again in July!

AREG’s Entry into the John Moyle Field Day Contest 2026

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During the 2010’s AREG used to regularly enter the John Moyle Field Day contest hosted by the WIA. For various reasons that activity waned in the last 4-5 years. So this year, we felt it was  time to re-enter the event and introduce the next generation of AREG members to domestic field day contesting.

VL5X Portable Hindmarsh Island – Multi-Op SSB Portable

Given this is a “Field Day”, it really needed to be a in the field club activity. That is what puts the “field” into the event after all. This year we were fortunate, through a friend of one of our members, to gain access to a 10 acre plot on Hindmarsh Island, about 90 minutes out of Adelaide. The site, which had a 10-15m hill at the back of the property and a couple of sheds in the middle was perfect and allowed us to spread the antennas out so we could operate a multi-operator station without causing interference between the bands.

Station Antenna Farm

Unique “Quick Deploy” Station experiment

One of the unique tricks used in this contest was Andy VK5AKH’s quick deployment station. He hired a van for the weekend, rolled his portable operating desk inside, loaded it up with gear and away he went. He was on air within an hour of arriving on site supporting our full 40m station.

Powering The Station

We set up three 400W portable contest stations on the site and then proceeded to power them as follows:

We had 3x Honda EU20i generators on site, originally planning that as our base load generation, given this contest did not permit us to use the mains to run the station. However, we also had something new that we had never tried before.

One of our members owns a Geely EX5 electric car. This car was unique in that it came equipped with a 3kW 240 Volt AC inverter, which we could use to draw power from the car’s 61kWh battery! Before the event, we were pretty trepidatious – concerned that the car would generate a lot of RFI and interference across HF. To our very happy surprise, however, the car was as quiet as a church mouse. In the end, we ran 2 of the three stations on the car inverter for the whole event. In the process, we invented a new unit of electrical consumption – “equivalent kilometres”. The two stations connected to the car, each with their respective 400W linear amplifiers, used a total of 65km worth of electricity. Not bad given the car has 410km of road range. This really does open up a whole new world for field day contesting into the future!

VL5X On The Air

As for operating the contest, we had a great turnout of operators, with VK5AKH, VK5QI, VK5FLY, VK5DUG, VK5VC, VK5FJ, VK5IR, VK5GR, VK5MN, VK5CIA. We also had a great roster of volunteers who helped construct and support the station including VK5ZM, VK5BX, VK5AG, VK5ZQV, VK5SAW, VK5KX, VK5AOK and others plus we had visits from Sue VK5AYL and David VK5ZL who were also interested to see what we were up to here at AREG.

We had operators as young as 10 yrs old (Douglas VK5DUG supported by dad Louis VK5FLY) right through to some in their mid 70s who remembered the John Moyle field day from a decade ago and wanted to come back and have another go. It was great to see them all getting into the spirit of the contest.

The crew was well looked after as well with support from Michael VK5MN who managed the catering and Jeremy VK5CIA who provided the bathroom facilities from his holiday home nearby. All the little things that become big issues when you are out in the field!

Thanks to Theo VK5IR, we also have a short film showing the setup including a few more details about the car we used to power the station and showing some of the on air activity including young Douglas VK5DUG who operated for us on several bands.

So how did we go?

Results are not out yet, but we were pretty happy with our score. We had the station manned for 22 of the 24hrs of the contest, and due to the lack of contestants during the night spent at least 2 hours calling with no answers. None the less, a great time was had by everyone. We look forward now to seeing the results and discussing what we might try next year!

Foxhunting today! 2pm Victoria Park Wetlands

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A reminder that the next foxhunt run by the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group will be run at 2pm today, starting with a foot based hunt around the Victoria Park Wetlands in the south park lands in the City, off Beaumont Road via South Terrace.

A vehicle based hunt will follow starting from ~3pm on both the 146 and 438 MHz amateur bands.

Fox hunts are now run monthly on the 1st Saturday of the month and are open to everyone to participate in. We hope to see you there!