Thank you everyone for your support of the AREG Car Boot Sale! It was a great success and will be back in 2024!
Special thanks to all our sponsors and Retailers!
… and VK Budget QSL Cards!
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 17th of November at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham, with doors opening at 7:00 PM, and the presentation kicking off at 7:30 PM. Everyone is welcome!
This presentation was recorded, and is available on Youtube below:
If you’ve never come along to one of our meetings, we’d love to see you there, all guests are welcome. For our remote members, the meeting will be broadcast via Zoom.
After the talks we’ll all be given an opportunity to have an eyeball QSO among ourselves whilst enjoying a tea or coffee and a biscuit.
73, Mark VK5QI
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 20th of October at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham, with doors opening at 7:00 PM, and the presentation kicking off at 7:30 PM. Everyone is welcome!
If you’ve never come along to one of our meetings, we’d love to see you there, all guests are welcome. For our remote members, the meeting will be broadcast via Zoom.
After the talks we’ll all be given an opportunity to have an eyeball QSO among ourselves whilst enjoying a tea or coffee and a biscuit.
73, Mark VK5QI
AREG are happy to announce that Sunday November 26th will see the return of the AREG Amateur Radio & Electronics Sale! It will again be held at the DogsSA Training Facility in Kilburn as a car boot sale format, with many local amateur radio operators, amateur radio clubs, and commercial vendors in attendance.
We currently have the following commercial vendors attending:
Booking for a sellers spot are open now, with spots running out quickly! If you’re interested in reserving a car or trailer spot, please contact the AREG secretary at: vk5arg@areg.org.au
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 15th of September at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham, with doors opening at 7:15 PM, and the presentation kicking off at 7:45 PM. Everyone is welcome!
This month’s presentation will be from Michaela VK3FUR, on how they utilised Amateur Radio during their trip across outback Western Australia in 2022.
If you’ve never come along to one of our meetings, we’d love to see you there, all guests are welcome. For our remote members, the meeting will be broadcast via Zoom, and we’ll also be broadcasting live on YouTube, on Hayden VK7HH’s HamRadioDX channel.
After the talks we’ll all be given an opportunity to have an eyeball QSO among ourselves whilst enjoying a tea or coffee and a biscuit.
73, Mark VK5QI
Horus 60 was launched on the 20th of August 2023 as part of AREG’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, and featured our popular SSTV imagery payload along with a new high-quality Wenet imagery payload and other experimental payloads.
On this launch we had Geordie VK3CLR along for the chase, who put together a great video of the day’s activities, and tells the tale better than I could write it up here!
Thanks again to Geordie for producing this!
A dashboard showing telemetry from the flight is available here, and the main statistics from the flight are shown in the following table:
Launch Date: | 2023-08-20T00:22:27.000000Z |
Landing Date: | 2023-08-20T02:35:26.000000Z |
Launch Site: | -35.07586, 138.85677 |
Landing Site: | -35.34007, 139.67903 |
Distance Travelled: | 80 km |
Maximum Altitude: | 35407 m |
The SSTV payload produced excellent imagery throughout the flight, though unfortunately we had a GPS fault again (likely due to interference from an adjacent payload), so no position/altitude overlays were shown on the images.
Images were received from many people around the Central SA area, with submissions for the SSTV reception certificate from: VK5KVA, VK5KX, VK5ST, VK5ZBI, VK5AV, VK5MA, VK5CLD, VK3FUR/5 and VK5ZM. If you received imagery from the flight, please email us at vi25areg@areg.org.au to get your certificate!
Horus 60 also had the first flight of a new Wenet imagery payload, this time utilising a PiCamera HQ and a large lens, promising much higher quality imagery than we’ve captured previously.
While previous attempts at using higher quality optics have had issues with defocusing in cold temperatures, on this flight the camera performed perfectly, with some of the best quality imagery we’ve seen from a Horus launch in a very long time!
As per tradition, just before packing up the Wenet payload, the chase team took a group photo near the landing site:
Thanks to all that helped receive the Wenet imagery:
VK3TNUpi4-1: 94460 packets (23.06 MB)
VK5CLD-9: 106422 packets (25.98 MB)
VK5KX-9: 165174 packets (40.33 MB)
VK5IS: 102056 packets (24.92 MB)
VK5QI-9: 113723 packets (27.76 MB)
The more receivers we have during a flight, the higher chance we have of obtaining clear imagery for live display on ssdv.habhub.org!
For this flight, the primary telemetry payload used the VI25AREG callsign, and performed flawlessly (as we always hope it will!). We had many receivers on this flight, with statistics on who received how many packets in the following table:
Callsign | Received Packets | Percentage of Flight Received | First-Received Altitude (m) | Last-Received Altitude (m) |
---|---|---|---|---|
BARC-RRR | 1777 | 95.8% | 664 | 255 |
VK3APJ | 270 | 14.6% | 11495 | 6738 |
VK3BKQ | 362 | 19.5% | 26022 | 27416 |
VK3IRV | 61 | 3.3% | 31868 | 34503 |
VK3TNU | 714 | 38.5% | 8354 | 9180 |
VK5ALG | 1446 | 78.0% | 864 | 6738 |
VK5AMH | 1693 | 91.3% | 1731 | 964 |
VK5APR | 1590 | 85.8% | 1240 | 6700 |
VK5ARG | 1760 | 94.9% | 477 | 911 |
VK5BD | 1371 | 73.9% | 5518 | 6738 |
VK5CLD | 235 | 12.7% | 2399 | 34005 |
VK5CLD-9 | 1516 | 81.8% | 342 | 22 |
VK5DJ | 662 | 35.7% | 9784 | 24529 |
VK5DSP-hab | 624 | 33.7% | 25743 | 6700 |
VK5IS | 1682 | 90.7% | 723 | 3247 |
VK5KX | 1580 | 85.2% | 1240 | 22 |
VK5KX-9 | 1437 | 77.5% | 8955 | 70 |
VK5LN | 1102 | 59.4% | 11683 | 7329 |
VK5NEX | 1529 | 82.5% | 964 | 6738 |
VK5QI-9 | 1348 | 72.7% | 339 | 16031 |
VK5RK | 1078 | 58.1% | 1661 | 29780 |
VK5RR-VK5FO | 435 | 23.5% | 14763 | 6700 |
VK5ST-4 | 1466 | 79.1% | 3146 | 6816 |
VK5TRM | 1597 | 86.1% | 1587 | 1018 |
VK5ZBI | 1585 | 85.5% | 1220 | 6777 |
VK5ZQV | 797 | 43.0% | 15601 | 6777 |
vk5mhz | 546 | 29.4% | 3761 | 24970 |
Thanks to all that received!
This payload was added on somewhat last-minute, and included a photo-diode-based radiation sensor, with the aim of investigating gamma ray levels throughout the flight, similar to what has been performed on previous flights.
As expected, the radiation count increased throughout the ascent, before falling again above 20km altitude due the Regener-Pfotzer Maximum effect. Some noise was observed on the sensor just after burst, likely due to the turbulence from the initial fast descent.
Thanks to everyone that received telemetry from this payload, even with the short notice of it’s inclusion in the flight!
Callsign | Received Packets | Percentage of Flight Received | First-Received Altitude (m) | Last-Received Altitude (m) |
---|---|---|---|---|
BARC-RRR | 899 | 91.7% | 609 | 189 |
VK3BKQ | 4 | 0.4% | 34806 | 35038 |
VK5ALG | 663 | 67.7% | 1092 | 6727 |
VK5ALG-9 | 428 | 43.7% | 8449 | 76 |
VK5APR | 791 | 80.7% | 1218 | 6804 |
VK5ARG | 862 | 88.0% | 507 | 1209 |
VK5CLD-9 | 707 | 72.1% | 347 | 16 |
VK5DJ | 320 | 32.7% | 27784 | 6727 |
VK5DSP-hab | 314 | 32.0% | 26216 | 6727 |
VK5KX-9 | 715 | 73.0% | 9012 | 76 |
VK5QI-9 | 676 | 69.0% | 346 | 16113 |
VK5RK | 284 | 29.0% | 30131 | 6644 |
VK5ST-4 | 788 | 80.4% | 2846 | 2375 |
VK5TRM | 765 | 78.1% | 1762 | 1264 |
vk5mhz | 19 | 1.9% | 2804 | 3471 |
This flight also saw a new LoRaWAN payload from Liam VK5ALG, which was received via the Helium Network using the 923 MHz ISM band. On this flight the furthest reception report was from a station in Peterborough, at approximately 250km range. Future flights of this will use a higher gain antenna, and we hope to see even higher reception ranges.
We hope to have positions from this payload showing up on the SondeHub-Amateur tracker on future launches!
A big thanks to everyone that participated in this launch, from those that came along to the launch site, chased, or received telemetry and imagery from home!
We hope to perform a few more flights later this year, including the return of a cross-band repeater payload!
Our VI25AREG Special Event QSL Card is now off to the printers. QSL cards will be available for ordering via our QSL Manager, Charles M0OXO.
The callsign still has 12 days to run and will conclude on 31st August 2023!
Cards can be requested using the Online QSL Request Service (OQRS) which offers options for both direct QSLs as well as via the Bureau. Note: We will only distribute cards via the M0OXO OQRS service. You can access the service via the following link: