AREG regrets to advise that due to the proximity of the usual monthly fox hunt date to the Riverland Paddling Marathon (where many AREG members will be heading to), the June fox hunt will not be going ahead.
Stay tuned for details regarding our July hunt, to be posted here closer to the date.
73 from AREG!
An X-class Solar Flare imaged by the Solar Dynamics Observatory in 2012.
Solar flares from the sun can result in many different effects on High Frequency (HF) propagation. The most immediate and noticeable is when the increased solar X-Ray flux resulting from a flare interacts with the ionosphere. These X-Rays charge the ionosphere’s D-layer (responsible of the absorption of the lower HF band during the daytime), and results in higher levels of absorption extending right up to the top of the band. This has the effect of reducing signal strengths right across the band, resulting in what is known as a ‘HF fadeout’.
X-Ray Flux data from the GOES satellites, provided by NOAA
Solar flares are categorised based on the peak X-ray flux they emit, with the different levels given letters A, B and C for relatively weak flares, and M and X for stronger flares, with X-class flares being the strongest. HF fadeouts are generally caused by M and X-class flares. A live plot of X-Ray flux data as observed by the Geostationary Operational Environment Satellites (GOES) is available here: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/goes-x-ray-flux
HF Fadeout Coverage area for a M1.2 class flare, from the Space Weather Service website.
The Australian Space Weather Service provides a HF fadeout warning service via email, and you can also see reports of the most recent HF fadeout on their website.
AREG hosts many services at its remote HF receive site located near Tarlee, including multiple KiwiSDRs, skimmers for WSPR, FT8 and SSTV, and other higher performing receivers reserved for club members. We thank Swoop Internet for providing us with the internet service at this site, for free!
The HF receiver antenna (a broadband monopole) at AREG’s remote HF receive site.
Using software written by Mark VK5QI, AREG also generates a Spectrograph showing the state of the HF band over the last 3 days. A spectrograph is similar to the waterfall display you might have seen on other SDR receiver software, though in this case covering the entire HF band (0 – 30 MHz), and looking over a much longer timescale. Warmer colours (reds and yellows) represent stronger signals, and cooler colours (blues and greens) represent weaker ones. The spectrograph updates approximately every 30 minutes, and is available at the bottom of the Remote HF Receiver site page, or directly here.
A typical HF Spectrograph, with some features annotated.
The spectrograph gives us a ‘quick look’ at the state of the HF band. The strongest signals (red) are the bands of shortwave stations around 6, 7, 9 and 11 MHz, mostly propagating in from south-east Asia. The most obvious time-varying effect is the change in propagation conditions from day (propagation mainly at the higher end of the band), to night (propagation mainly at the lower end of the band), but we can also see other effects such as solar radio bursts, local noise issues, and of course HF fadeouts.
In the above figure, a number of HF fadeout events over the 18th through 20th May 2023 period have been marked, showing the X-Ray flux event they correspond to. The HF fadeouts can be seen as a sudden reduction in signal strength right across the HF band, followed by a slow return to normal. Note that we don’t see the effects of X-ray flux events occurring during our local night, due to the Earth sheltering us from those X-rays.
So, next time you think the HF band seems a bit dead, maybe go take a look at the AREG HF Spectrograph to see if there’s a HF fadeout in progress!
73 Mark VK5QI
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 19th of May at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham.
Unfortunately Paul is unavailable to give the talk at this meeting. Instead Grant VK5GR will be presenting on RTTY contesting. Thanks to Grant for agreeing to present on such short notice!
This months presentation will be from Paul Simmonds VK5PAS, on the recent Troubridge Island DXpedition. Paul will talk about how the expedition was planned, what antennas and equipment they used on the island, and discuss the results of the expedition and lessons learned.
Doors open at 7.15pm and the presentation kicks off at 7.45. Everyone is welcome to attend. 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 try and get a recording of the talk for later upload to Youtube.
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
One of the services that the Amateur Radio Experimenter’s Group provides is a network of repeater stations that cover the Adelaide metropolitan and surrounding areas. These systems operate on the 6m-23cm bands from 3 sites in and around Adelaide.
One of the first repeaters conceived by AREG was the Adelaide CBD repeater. Inspired in the 1990s by the original 438.025 VK3RCC repeater in Melbourne (which was located atop one of the hi-rise towers in Melbourne CBD), the intention was to reach the deep CBD buildings and the Adelaide foot hills shadowed by the existing repeaters atop the Mt Lofty ranges.
The AREG repeater in Adelaide was originally established on top of the original Angas Street police station building – then 11 stories high in Victoria Square. When that building was subsequently demolished, it was moved to another building off Flinders Street, where it ran for many years before finally developing a terminal fault.
Today, VK5RSA is back on what now is one of the best communications sites in the CBD. This is all thanks to the support AREG receives from KernWi-Fi, who are sponsoring access to Westpac House on King William Street in the heart of the Adelaide CBD.
VK5RSA operates on 438.025MHz TX -7.0MHz RX with 91.5Hz CTCSS
VK5 Linked Repeater Network Coverage Map
VK5RSA is also part of the new central SA linked repeater network. This network now includes 10 repeaters, stretching from the Adelaide area right across to the eastern border of SA, and south to Victor Harbor.
AREG offers it’s sincere thanks to Phil Kern at KernWi-Fi for his support for the project to re-establish VK5RSA – it is fantastic to have been able to restore this service for the amateur radio community in Adelaide – and from such a fantastic site too!
KernWi-Fi supply Fibre, NBN, Fixed Wireless Internet, VoIP, Event Wi-Fi and Radio Communications to residential and businesses all over Adelaide. They also specialise in servicing the black spots of Adelaide. To learn more, visit their website!
They are 100% Adelaide based and owned Licensed Carrier and work with many local communities to provide high speed internet services. They also sponsor various community groups across the state.
AREGs next car-based fox hunt will be held this coming Friday the 12th of May, starting from the car park of the North Adelaide Aquatic Centre Carpark at 6:30 PM. We’ll have three foxes deployed around the Adelaide area, on both the 2m and 70cm bands, so come along and have a go!
The frequencies will be:
As usual, liaison will be on the VK5RSB Summertown 70cm repeater which operates on 439.900 (-5MHz) 91.5 CTCSS. Please come up on the repeater so we know how you are faring throughout the evening!
The event is open to anyone with radio direction finding equipment and will span most of the Adelaide metropolitan area. We would love to see you there!
73
Mark VK5QI
The event calendar this year is looking pretty good for South Australian Amateur Radio operators, with the South Coast Amateur Radio Club Buy & Sell coming up on the 23rd of April, and the Adelaide Hills Amateur Radio Society Buy & Sell on the 15th of July.
To round out the event calendar for 2023, 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. We will be inviting all of the SA Radio Clubs to participate as well as a number of commercial vendors!
More details will follow in coming months – but for now you simply need to:
Sunday
November 26th
2023
We hope to see you there!
Update: This presentation was recorded, and is now available on Youtube.
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 21st of April at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham.
This months presentation will be from Bob Phillips VK5FO, on the topic “Using Quarter Wave Coaxial Stubs as Notch Filters”. Bob will cover off the basic theory and characteristics of coax stub filters, demonstrate how to construct and tune them using a NanoVNA, and discuss their practical use-cases.
Doors open at 7.15pm and the presentation kicks off at 7.45. Everyone is welcome to attend. 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
Horus 59 came about as a result of the Southern Hemisphere Space Studies Program launch, as we still an almost-full cylinder of Helium left over. Launch planning progressed through February, resulting in a launch on Sunday the 25th of February 2023.
The following payloads flew on this launch:
Iain Crawford VK5ZD captured much of the days events on video:
This launch aimed to get more AREG club members involved in the launch planning process. Mark VK5QI ran a series of workshops in the lead-up to the launch, working through the regulatory and planing aspects of a high-altitude balloon launch. The day before the launch a smaller group got together to test telemetry reception and go through some of the more practical aspects of a launch. We hope to run more workshops like this for future launches!
Some of the launch planning group working through practicing filling a balloon.
The launch team gathered at the Auburn Community oval at 9AM and started preparing for the flight. This launch saw many spectators, including a few from the mid-north. Iain VK5ZD was also on-site to document the launch activities, with a video to come soon (once he’s back from a holiday!). The launch site weather was perfect, with mostly clear skies and only light winds.
AREG Club Members preparing the balloon for launch, with many onlookers! (Imaged by the Wenet payload waiting to be launched)
All the payload were powered on, tested and sealed up, and the balloon was filled. This was a ‘fast fill’ launch, using up all the leftover gas from the previous SHSSP 2023 launch, and went smoothly.
The balloon and payloads were raised into the air, with the final payload handed over to Jackson (son of AREG member Brett VK5TLE) to perform the launch!
Launch!
After the launch, the chase teams (and there were 7 of them on this launch!) headed north-east to get closer to the predicted landing area, pulling in at a rest stop south of Hanson, SA.
Chase Teams waiting for the balloon to burst near Hanson, SA
Peter VK5KX was set up here with his portable rotator station, receiving telemetry from all payloads:
Peter VK5KX’s portable tracking setup
While waiting at the Hanson rest stop the balloon was spotted flying at 30 km altitude, almost directly above the rest stop location! Appearing as a small white dot, many of the chasers were able to watch the balloon travel across the sky for about 20 minutes, before seeing it disappear when it burst at 32,807 metres altitude.
Iain, Ady, Drew and Mark watching the balloon drift along at 30km altitude.
The chase teams didn’t have far to travel to get to the landing area, only 7km to the North-East of Hanson, just off the Barrier Highway. All the teams were able to get into position to watch the payload descend into an empty paddock, a great experience for the new balloon chasers!
Horus 59 Flight Path
The payloads were quickly recovered, with the mandatory Wenet Payload group photo being taken once the payload were back at the cars:
Horus 59 Chase Team Group Photo, taken by the Wenet Payload camera.
Apart from an issue with the onboard GPS receiver, the FM-SSTV payload transmitted imagery fine all throughout the flight. So far we’ve received a few reception reports from the Adelaide area, and also Pt Lincoln, though we expect this payload would have been receivable well into Victoria. If you received imagery from this flight, please let us know!
A selection of images received by Mark VK5QI’s home station in Adelaide are shown below:
The new camera (A Raspberry Pi Camera v3) under trial on this launch produces images with excellent colour and low distortion, however as it ascended the lens started to de-focus, resulting in all the images above a few km altitude being quite blurry.
This is most likely due the extreme cold the camera was subjected to resulting in physical variation of the lens-to-sensor spacing. Whether this can be compensated for will be determined through some on-ground experiments (dry ice might be involved…), though it’s likely we’ll look at other camera options for future launches.
A selection of photos taken by the Wenet payload camera are shown in the following gallery:
On this flight Liam’s LoRaWAN payload featured an upgraded antenna, and even though the maximum altitude of this flight was 500m below when the LoRaWAN payload was previous flown (Horus 58), it was received another 50km further afield, by a TheThingsNetwork station in Ballarat, Victoria. We’ll try out this payload again on future launches, hoping to get even longer reception reports!
LoRaWAN Payload Coverage Map
The Horus Binary payload proved to be as reliable as ever, reporting position and sensor data throughout the flight. A Grafana dashboard summarising the telemetry data from the flight is available here.
We saw a total of 25 unique callsigns receiving on this flight, with reception statistics for each station shown below:
| Callsign | Received Packets | Percentage of Flight Received | First-Received Altitude (m) | Last-Received Altitude (m) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BARC-RRR | 16 | 0.9% | 11576 | 3437 |
| N0CALL | 1 | 0.1% | 3347 | 3347 |
| VK3TNU pi3-3 | 841 | 45.0% | 13424 | 15292 |
| VK5AJQ | 1413 | 75.7% | 9021 | 1681 |
| VK5AKH | 940 | 50.3% | 6888 | 536 |
| VK5AKK | 1763 | 94.4% | 550 | 1030 |
| VK5ALG | 1707 | 91.4% | 726 | 1427 |
| VK5ALG-9 | 1812 | 97.1% | 311 | 536 |
| VK5APR | 1 | 0.1% | 1081 | 1081 |
| VK5ARG | 1834 | 98.2% | 309 | 570 |
| VK5CLD-9 | 1518 | 81.3% | 310 | 536 |
| VK5DJ | 982 | 52.6% | 10405 | 12276 |
| VK5DSP-hab | 1368 | 73.3% | 7775 | 4207 |
| VK5EME-5 | 1814 | 97.2% | 638 | 1342 |
| VK5FADE | 82 | 4.4% | 1936 | 4044 |
| VK5HI | 16 | 0.9% | 14690 | 14867 |
| VK5IS | 1848 | 99.0% | 406 | 570 |
| VK5KX#2 | 93 | 5.0% | 11438 | 13232 |
| VK5KX-9 | 1649 | 88.3% | 669 | 570 |
| VK5KX-i5 | 552 | 29.6% | 13942 | 570 |
| VK5LN | 1551 | 83.1% | 4373 | 5363 |
| VK5NEX | 1786 | 95.7% | 1295 | 1342 |
| VK5NTM | 1777 | 95.2% | 1842 | 806 |
| VK5QI-9 | 1645 | 88.1% | 310 | 606 |
| VK5ST-4 | 1507 | 80.7% | 726 | 1797 |
| VK5ZBI | 1070 | 57.3% | 6739 | 3600 |
| VK5ZQV | 564 | 30.2% | 14069 | 30447 |
| Callsign | Received Packets | Percentage of Flight Received | First-Received Altitude (m) | Last-Received Altitude (m) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BARC-RRR | 1554 | 83.0% | 1011 | 890 |
| VK3TNU pi3-3 | 900 | 48.1% | 11821 | 15415 |
| VK5AKH | 820 | 43.8% | 6884 | 562 |
| VK5AKK | 1737 | 92.8% | 567 | 1697 |
| VK5ALG | 1737 | 92.8% | 639 | 1929 |
| VK5ALG-9 | 1802 | 96.3% | 312 | 500 |
| VK5ARG | 1828 | 97.6% | 312 | 598 |
| VK5CLD-9 | 1676 | 89.5% | 312 | 500 |
| VK5CV | 1478 | 79.0% | 987 | 3986 |
| VK5DSP-hab | 1342 | 71.7% | 7779 | 6660 |
| VK5KX-9 | 1802 | 96.3% | 733 | 530 |
| VK5QI-9 | 1816 | 97.0% | 311 | 530 |
| VK5ST-4 | 1789 | 95.6% | 639 | 1122 |
| VK5SWR | 60 | 3.2% | 22239 | 23376 |
This flight saw 10 receiver stations contributing packets to the live imagery on https://ssdv.habhub.org/. Thanks to all that helped out with this!
VK5LO: 63593 packets (15.53 MB)
VK5IS: 126191 packets (30.81 MB)
VK3TNUpi4-1: 7311 packets (1.78 MB)
VK5CLD-9: 40111 packets (9.79 MB)
VK5PW: 110448 packets (26.96 MB)
VK5KX: 56684 packets (13.84 MB)
VK5AKH: 40550 packets (9.90 MB)
VK5QI: 146240 packets (35.70 MB)
VK5ALG: 98107 packets (23.95 MB)
VK5ST: 638 packets (0.16 MB)
Even with some payload issues, Horus 59 was a successful launch and saw lots of AREG club members get involved in the planning, execution, and chase aspects of the flight. Thanks to all that came out for the day, and also thanks to those that helped receive telemetry throughout the flight!
Project Horus’ next launch will likely not be for a few months, and will hopefully see the return of the DVB-S transmitter payload, and live video from the stratosphere!
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Flight Designation: | Horus 59 |
| Launch Date: | 2023-02-25 23:29Z |
| Landing Date: | 2023-02-26 01:42Z |
| Flight Duration: | ~2 hours, 12 min |
| Launch Site: | -34.02935, 138.69128 |
| Landing Site: | -33.70648, 138.88831 |
| Distance Traveled: | 40 km |
| Maximum Altitude: | 32,807 m |
