Hello Doug and Bill,
Well done. Thanks for sending your excellent video my way.
I'm passing this on to our local Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club list server.
Rod Fritz, WB9KMO
P.S. Good luck with WhiteStarBalloon (see www.whitestarballoon.org).
-----Original Message----- From: Douglas Crandall [mailto:dmcrandall@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 1:33 PM To: wb8elk@aol.com Cc: Undisclosed Recipients... Subject: Re: WB8ELK 20 meter HF balloon landing site has been received from CA
Here's a link to a clip of the video stream I made http://tinyurl.com/4e4kvay
On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:35 PM, wb8elk@aol.com wrote:
Beautiful day to fly....clear skies, 65 degrees and light surface winds. Thanks to all who tuned into the streaming video of the launch and to all those who listened on 20 meters for the balloon signals. It was tough for
my
half-watt balloon transmitter to compete with all the kilowatt RTTY
contest
stations but several of us in the Huntsville and the southeast had good reception out to 180 miles or more. We all lost the signal after it parachuted below our radio horizon in eastern Georgia at about 20,000
feet.
I received reception reports from AL, NC and partial reports from W0RPK in Iowa and KB9ZWL in WI. I was able to copy some partial reports via the
Grand
Junction, Colorado GlobalTuner radio as well.
I just received a reception report with a complete telemetry frame about
45
minutes AFTER it landed in east Georgia from Kamal KA6MAL in CA. He copied the signal at 00:03 UTC and thanks to his report from across the country
we
now know that it landed near Carnesville, GA not far from the SC
border just
north of I-85.
Here's the final landing site telemetry frame as received in CA:
$WB8ELK2,242,00:03:00,3426.16,-08312.74,245,06,8.38,24,000*
<callsign,sequence#,UTCtime,lat(ddmm.mm),lon(dddmm.mm),altitude(m),satellite s,battery
voltage,internal temperature (C),spare field which will be used on the WhiteStar flight>
which translates to a landing spot of: 34 deg 26.16 min 83 deg 12.74 min
The altitude of 245m works out to 803 feet...the topo map shows 740 feet there so looks like it's 60 feet up in a tree.
It's great fun to fly HF for balloons as the last few HF flights I've received reports of the landing spot from a thousand miles away or more. It's also great to include the whole country (and World) in a balloon
flight
in this manner.
I plan more HF balloon flights and the White Star Balloon trans-Atlantic balloon will be flying soon on 40 meters as well (7.102 MHz USB).
The flight track for today's flight is still up for viewing at: http://spacenear.us/tracker
For those who asked...there was no APRS transmitter on this flight....just the Multi-Mode HF Transmitter sending out DominoEX16, RTTY, Hellscreiber
and
CW and plotting on the Spacenear website.
600 gram eBay special balloon....3 foot Spherachutes parachute, Payload weight of 11 ounces, 20m dipole antenna was 2 ounces.....total flight
train
weight: 1 lb 4 oz...balloon nozzle lift of 2 lb 11 oz.
I also tested my new latex balloon vent valve. It did not include the
servo
to open it...I just flew it to see if it leaked during the flight....I haven't calculated the ascent profile to see if it leaked any but it did make it to 97,782 feet which is not bad for a $20 eBay surplus 600 gram balloon.
73s de Bill WB8ELK
P.S. No paper airplane drop this flight....the Makers Local 256 club are adding some features to their paper airplane payload so it will fly in March.