Launch Announcement - Fri, 19th Aug or possibly Mon/Tues

[Nick McCloud]

Launching with Bolton Wireless Club from a park in west Bolton. As well as my classic PitS & BakTrak combo, there will be a morse beacon on 2m reporting on temperature - see https://www.boltonwireless.org.uk/2m-beacon for details.

PitS will be on  LoRa mode 1 on 434.666 (notional, my base station & mobile trackers are reporting ±10kHz), callsign BCW-L.

As it's an old school PitS, it comes with RTTY USB on 434.333, 8N2, baud 300, width 720, callsign BCW-,R. The Horus-GUI 'just works' but doesn't do SSDV. If you are a radio peep you may enjoy piping audio from your receiver through fldigi and on to HABBase. 

If you can only listen to one thing on your rig, please go with the beacon. If you know anyone on the south coast (of England AND France) please ask them to tune in - we want to know how far this thing can go.

The mascot seen on SSDV is Steve G4AQB's grandsons.

Aiming to launch at 11:00.

We will have a base station on LoRa and my car will have trackers on LoRa and  RTTY plus Ross & others he has recruited to the HAB tracking cause.

We have a week long window but it seems that the predictions are leaning towards Fri 29th or the following Mon/Tues. The Jet Stream looks to take launches far too East for anyones liking over the weekend - and will probably do the same for Wed onwards.

More news as the week progresses,

Nick

[John Laidler]

29th?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "UKHAS" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ukhas+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ukhas/0fc98832-eb10-4c77-b6d8-c3fb3dad037fn%40googlegroups.com.

[Ross G6GVI]

We're indebted to Nick for providing this "air-lift" for our experimental 2m beacon, G0BWC, which will send a repeating Morse message at about 15 words/min: "CQ DE G0BWC G0BWC QRPP BEACON TEST DE G0BWC IN IO83 TEMP 2760 PRES 101686"

It's only transmitting 10mW but whilst ground-testing this week it was picked up by a hilltop station (using a high-gain yagi) at a range of more than 50km.

Meanwhile on UHF, I think that Nick's PitS will be operating with the callsigns BWC-L and BWC-R.

On Monday, 25 August 2025 at 23:36:23 UTC+1 Nick McCloud wrote:

Launching with Bolton Wireless Club from a park in west Bolton. there will be a morse beacon on 2m reporting on temperature - see https://www.boltonwireless.org.uk/2m-beacon for details.

[John Laidler]

Is this CW in the sense it's a pure RF sine wave and not FM with a tone or anything like that?

I won't be able to listen on the 29th but if the flight is delayed I should be able to.

John

M0WIV 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "UKHAS" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ukhas+un...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ukhas/51a16e3b-2df7-477d-bbbd-58e069866b66n%40googlegroups.com.

[Ross G6GVI]

Yes indeed John, it's traditional On-Off Keying of the carrier:

Remember that it's operating in the segment of the band reserved for Telegraphy (CW) and MGM modes with a maximum transmission bandwidth of 500Hz.

By the way, if you have "Spot" enabled (and have set up the PSK Report options in the Misc Config), then Fldigi will automatically pick out the callsign and post to PSK Reporter every half-hour: https://www.pskreporter.info/pskmap.html?preset&callsign=G0BWC&txrx=tx&mode=CW&band=75000000-160000000&timerange=86400&hideunrec=1&hidepink=1&hidenight=1&hidelight=1&showgrid=1&showsnr=1&mapCenter=54.46233212897482,-2.336618686896944,5.79436526598358

[John Laidler]

Thanks!

On Tue, 26 Aug 2025 at 13:33, Ross G6GVI <ross....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes indeed John, it's traditional On-Off Keying of the carrier:
>

> Remember that it's operating in the segment of the band reserved for Telegraphy (CW) and MGM modes with a maximum transmission bandwidth of 500Hz.
>
> By the way, if you have "Spot" enabled (and have set up the PSK Report options in the Misc Config), then Fldigi will automatically pick out the callsign and post to PSK Reporter every half-hour: https://www.pskreporter.info/pskmap.html?preset&callsign=G0BWC&txrx=tx&mode=CW&band=75000000-160000000&timerange=86400&hideunrec=1&hidepink=1&hidenight=1&hidelight=1&showgrid=1&showsnr=1&mapCenter=54.46233212897482,-2.336618686896944,5.79436526598358
>
> On Tuesday, 26 August 2025 at 13:15:21 UTC+1 John Laidler wrote:
>
> Is this CW in the sense it's a pure RF sine wave and not FM with a tone or anything like that?
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "UKHAS" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ukhas+un...@googlegroups.com.

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ukhas/adaa4d6b-5118-4e3b-a438-b2db5f951eden%40googlegroups.com.

[Nick McCloud]

John wins the special typo spotting prize - must stop posting late evening - oh wait ...

Fri 29th is looking like the mess of concrete some may call Leeds & surrounding area. But Mon/Tues is landing in areas of green. Decision to be made Wed.

Doing a launch with a school is so much simpler, they can only do it on one day, so it's either Yes or No!

[Nick McCloud]

Despite polite email followup to AROps yesterday, no response, so no permission, so very definitely no flight tomorrow. And if I can't get a response tomorrow, no flight over the weekend or Monday. However Tuesday is looking preferable in an airmass that really can't make up its mind. Fingers crossed.

[Nick McCloud]

I've now got the permission, one day late, but as a Brucie-Bonus they will lodge NOTAP's for every day 9am to 12pm launch so I can just crack on - we have two launches but at present I need to get the first one done before we decide on a second one.

[Nick McCloud]

Looking to launch Tuesday, 2nd September - 10:30 earliest, 12pm (per NOTAP) latest, just need to move it out of Leeds-Bradford CTR / departure corridor hence the time range.

[Nick McCloud]

Thanks for all the listeners - we are collating the reception reports for the 2m beacon - we had 6 greater than 250km and one up in Stornoway that was 500km - we also had plenty of amateur callsigns on both LoRa & RTTY - the second being real easy for the ham community to receive so I'm glad I've still got this PitS running.

We felt we got a good float in almost completely still air but the ascent rate was slower than computed. To clear Leeds-Bradford entirely & keep out of its CTR on landing I had it at 4m/s up and 4.73m/s down. I'll crunch the actual numbers this evening. The consequences were that it didn't go round Bradford but went further east and went round Leeds, headed north in the next bit of airstream for more time so the descent phase was shifted north by about 12km and 17km east. So rather than landing on a cross roads outside Harrogate, it landed in the middle of a huge flat stubble field - the orange parachute & three small white boxes visible from the road ~300m away!

Fill issues would appear to have happened with the June Woodi flight but as it was very breezy with the line almost horizontal with the ground getting a float was totaly academic. I'll have to refine my technique.

Thanks again for everyone helping out at the receiving end!