Predicted flight path for KK6PUZ-1 on Saturday March, 14, 2015

College Amateur Radio APRS aboard the Cal High Altitude Balloon Launch this Saturday 3/14 from the Main Glade – Come Join Us!

This Saturday around 12pm Pacific (1900UTC) as part of the “Pi Day” celebration (which will be STEM-focused) the Space Exploration Society at Berkeley will launch a High Altitude Balloon from the main glade at the Cal Campus.  The launch team is planning for the craft to attain an altitude of around 100,000 feet and at present the flight time will be around 3 hours (and then it will descend with an estimated touch-down at 2153UTC).  

Please feel free to pass this along to your friends, family, and associates!  Can you help spread the word?  🙂

AMATEUR RADIO ON BOARD

The balloon will have a GPS-enabled Amateur radio Packet Reporting System (APRS) tracker on-board transmitting at 144.390MHz (the national APRS frequency for 2m) using the callsign KK6PUZ-1 which belongs to Cal Planetary Sciences student Kareem Shaik.  So if you run an APRS iGate in the area from Berkeley to Copperopolis, or you’ve been looking for a good reason to set one up, get ready for Pi Day!

There will be other systems on-board for photography and telemetry.  You can also track the balloon while in-flight at the High Altitude Balloon Hub.

We could really use some help with tracking and recovering this balloon.  If you know people in the area, please invite them to participate as well.  We are still needing to pull together a few items, including the APRS antenna for the balloon as well as an antenna for the live video feed.

Here’s a chance to put many aspects of ham radio to use:

• APRS
• Fox-hunting
• Signal triangulation
• Mobile radio net
• Antenna modeling/building
• Batteries in extreme conditions
• Abiding by regulations including those of the FAA
• YOUR imagination !!!

UPDATE (20151110):  the balloon and its payload were safely recovered the day after the launch by Jason, KK6OQW who contacted us, and we drove out to Tracy to make the exchange.  The excitement in the chase vehicles was immense. It’s like geocaching, scavenger hunting, road-tripping, ham radio, mobile NASA Ground Control/Tracking, geekfest, physics-meets-poetry, BEYOND THE CLASSROOM. This is the sort of experience that imprints for life.Without further ado, here are the videos:

A photo Jason KK6OQW took of the SESB-1/KK6PUZ landing site.

The full flight in video:

 73 and Go (Cal) Bears!

I finally had time, and (Nitto) awesome double-sided tape to run the G-code for the BLTuner pcb I had written about earlier.

Excellent results! And I was being a total chicken$hit with the feed rate, I could have run it easily at 4 inches per minute.

There were actually two toolpaths: the first was the actual pad isolation and the second was cutting the small board out. I did the first with the 3mm V-bit sold by Zen Toolworks and the profile cut-out with a 1/8 ballnose.

Wow, I am so impressed with the SDR-Radio application ( http://sdr-radio.com/ ).  When I last had a chance to mess around with my Software Defined Radios (a FunCube Dongle and the RX Ensemble) the software that was available didn’t work very well.  So yesterday, when I downloaded and installed SDR-Radio, I just about fell out of my chair.  SDR software had basically gone from that scene in Space Odyssey 2001 where the early primate is throwing a bone, to that very next scene where we are now in space . . . THAT was the quantum leap I experienced when I started this program.

A view of the SDR-Radio Console (click to see full image)

Not only can you use SDR-Radio to tun into your own radios, you can tap into others on the network who are sharing their equipment with the public (and bravo to all who do).  This is a full-featured package and I hope to have more to add as I explore this fine piece of software.