PicoHorus “N+2” was launched at 11AM CDT on Saturday the 2nd of Jan 2016. The payload consisted of a light telemetry beacon, weighing in at 45 grams including batteries. A small latex balloon was used, deliberately under-filled in an attempt to achieve a ‘float’ condition at approximately 30km altitude.

The payload was launched near Mt Barker in the Adelaide Hills, from a fairly windy hill:

The wind, combined with the very small amount of balloon neck lift resulted in the balloon not rising at all for a few minutes! Eventually the balloon rose above the higher ground winds, and continued on upwards at the desired ascent rate of 1m/s.

The telemetry beacon transmitted the ‘standard’ RTTY telemetry as well as an experimental binary FSK mode developed by David Rowe. The binary telemetry was transmitted between the RTTY telemetry frames, and proved to be far more reliable than the RTTY telemetry, especially in low SNR conditions(more to come on this!). Unfortunately the demodulator for the binary telemetry is not quite in a ‘user friendly’ state yet, and so it was only used by a small number of listeners, with the rest using the dl-fldigi software. Special thanks to Joe VK5EI and Ivan VK5HS for tracking the RTTY payload through the majority of the flight!

PicoHorus N+2 Flight Profile

The balloon proceeded to head east to the Victorian border while slowly ascending to a maximum altitude of 28376m. After floating for approximately 20 minutes, the balloon burst, sending the payload plummeting to the ground at 15m/s. The balloon was tracked down to 3.3km altitude by Ivan, from his home QTH near Renmark. The final position placed the balloon about 25km north-west of Pinaroo, SA, approximately 200km east of the launch site.

PicoHorus N+2 Landing Area

Recovery

This payload wasn’t originally intended to be recovered, but given the landing location looked reasonable for a recovery, Andy VK5AKH and Mark VK5QI decided a Sunday drive was in order to see if the payload was still operational.

Leaving Adelaide at around 8:30am, they arrived at the expected landing site around 11:30am to find the payload still transmitting strongly, and reporting a position just 50m away from a road. A short walk into a field had the payload in hand!

Thanks again to everyone that helped out decoding telemetry, without your input we would have not been able to recover the payload.

Our next balloon launch is scheduled for late January – stay tuned!

73s, Mark VK5QI

This Saturday (2nd Jan 2016) at around 11AM, Mark VK5QI and David Rowe VK5DGR will be launching a “Pico” (sub-50g) balloon payload, with the aim of testing a new Binary FSK telemetry mode. This is intended to be the next evolution of the Project Horus 70cm RTTY down-link and should result in more reliable telemetry, but without the slow update-rate penalty of data modes like Olivia or JT65. 

The binary telemetry modem is still under development, and the de-modulator currently only exists as a collection of Octave and Python scripts. However, the payload will still be transmitting the ‘classic’ RTTY telemetry on 434.650MHz, along with binary telemetry on the same frequency. A guide to tracking using dl-fldigi is available here.

The launch is intended to have a very slow ascent rate (~1m/s), with the intent of causing the balloon to float at around 15-20km altitude. However, the balloon is of fairly old stock and may burst early. If a float does occur, the flight path should track towards Victoria.

As always, listeners are much appreciated, especially as we won’t be chasing this flight. The flight will be trackable on the day at: http://tracker.habhub.org/

73s, Mark VK5QI

Mark VK5QI in conjunction with David VK5DGR undertook the Horus telemetry test flight today and were met with roaring success. Here is a short photo blog of the day’s events.

100g Totex Ceiling balloon, approx 500g of neck lift.

Launch!

Cutdown payload just below the balloon (cutdown capsule just above the cutdown payload, though it’s not really visible in this picture). Below that is the parachute, and far below that is the RTTY payload.

Tracking from Pt Lincoln!

Joel Stanley (VK5FJMS) was tracking from Winters Hill in Pt Lincoln, and was able to ‘ping’ the payload using a fairly modest antenna setup.

Horus Messenger!

Screenshot of the ‘Horus Messenger’ software in operation. This allows us to transmit text messages from the LoRa ‘ground stations’, which are then digi-peated by the balloon payload. You can see a brief chat between myself and Joel.

Cutdown time!

Do I really really want to cutdown? Yes, yes I do!

Landing Site Map

(With us heading back to a road that gets us closer to the landing site)

Landing Site

Lots of gum trees. The landowners (Alex and a nice lady who’s name I can’t remember) were very nice retired couple, who assisted us in getting to the landing site through a number of sheep-filled paddocks.

Quad-Bike Assist

One of the landowners driving down to open some gates and disable some electric fences for us.

David (VK5DGR) DFing

David Rowe doing some direction finding on the RTTY payload. Also sheep.

Recovered!

The payloads were found hanging from a gum-tree, about 2m above ground level.

Mark VK5QI is planning to launch a couple of ‘medium’ altitude balloons this week as test flights of a new LoRa based flight termination controller. The first is tomorrow Tuesday (29th), and one possibly on Saturday (2nd Jan). Both will be launched from the Mt Barker High School Oval, and will only have a maximum altitude of 15km or so.

Testing new Command Systems

The primary aims for these launches are:

• Test the LoRa RF link.
• Test some new uplink & message-digi-peating features of the payload.
• Test a new cut-down mechanism (something with a little more ‘bang’ than before.

LoRa payloads have flown on the last few Horus launches, as a lead up to the retirement of the current ‘Osiris’ cutdown payload, which uses a now-obsolete FSK modem-on-a-chip. The new LoRa payloads have the potential to provide a more reliable uplink using far less power. The downside is that specialised receiver hardware is required (well, as specialised as a module you can buy on eBay for $10 is) . As such, it’ll only be used on the cutdown payload, where the only people really interested in it are those of us in the chase cars who are trying to recover all the shiny cameras hanging beneath the balloon!

Where to Listen?

Both launches will be at 10:30AM CDT, and will have the following payloads attached:

• RTTY Telemetry: 434.450MHz, 100 baud 7N2 (Use dl-fldigi to decode this as usual)
• LoRa Payload: 431.650MHz, 125KHz bandwidth, 4/8 Coding Rate, SF10

As always, trackers are appreciated. The flights will be able to monitored via www.habhub.org