Fwd: Balloon Launch Tomorrow! 17/6/10 11:00BST Churchill, Cambridge
James Coxon
Just to announce that there is going to be a balloon launch tomorrow
from Churchill, Cambridge at ~ 11:00BST. Onboard will be Nova 18
consisting of the CUSF Ferret tracker and a school experiment and also
there will be Pegasus VII a SSTV payload. Normal flight profile is
expect, burst altitude just over 30km landing just South West of
Milton Keynes.
1) Nova 18 contains the CUSF Ferret Arduino Tracker consisting of a
SIRF III GPS, ATmega168 and NTX2 10mW Radio on 434.650Mhz. To track
this select 'ferret' in dl-fldigi and tune to 434.650Mhz USB. This
will be the main tracker with continous telemetry - however as it uses
a SIRF III GPS it will stop working above 24km and resume on descent.
2) Pegasus VII is a gumstix based SSTV payload. It will be
transmitting an image every 3 minutes and in between will be 6 strings
of RTTY telemetry. To track Pegasus VII select 'pegvii' in dl-fldigi.
Pegasus VII is transmitting on 434.075Mhz USB. To decode the images
there are a number programs available - on Windows MMSSTV, Mac OSX
Multiscan and Linux Qsstv. It is possible also to run MMSSTV in wine.
Currently the base station setup is to run dl-fldigi and MMSSTV in
wine at the same time, they will only decode their own signal. Pegasus
VII has a ublox GPS so will work above 24km however the telemetry will
have gaps due to the downlinked image.
Tracking is very welcome, both old and new dl-fldigi will work - we
are starting to move to using the new dl-fldigi so if you want to test
that out feel free, more info can be found on the UKHAS wiki:
http://ukhas.org.uk/projects:dl-fldigi
As usual the flight path will be on http://spacenear.us/tracker and
chat will be on #highaltitude on irc.freenode.net . It'll also be
possible to follow progress on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jamescoxon
and we'll be using the #tags of #cusf and #pegvii
Thanks
Ed Moore, James Coxon and the rest of the CUSF team