Launch Announcment - Now 30/06/2022

[j.r.h...@gmail.com]

Hi All,

We are sending up a balloon this morning from Buckinghamshire, LoRa Mode 1 434.225MHz callsign SpaceEAL.

No RTTY but we have a back GPS sim tracker for groundrecovery and backup in case of flextrak failure.

Predicted landing site around Loughborough area.

Thanks

Jonathan

[Phil Cox]

Good luck with the launch, awesome day for it!

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[Steve Shuff]

Thanks for the update, and good luck.

I will be watching via  Habhub. 

Best regards.  

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[Jean Paul Béhague]

Hello

Ok, thanks for info

My receiver is ready for it

Good luck

Jean Paul F6ASP in Calais

73

[j.r.h...@gmail.com]

So we lost LoRa telemetry past 240m, ground station went dead. We had the exact same issue on a launch last week, call sign FLOKI.

We have used different Flextrak's with different antennas so a bit stuck. We know the FLOKI tracker was running the whole time as we were able to retrieve it.

The antennas we are using are 1/4 Wave ground planes following UKHAS instructions. the antenna worked fine on Monday during a Launch for Berkhamstead school on an older Pi In The Sky Tracker.

After the Floki launch we investigated the antenna and did line of sight tests upto 700m no issue and confirmed the antenna operation.

[j.r.h...@gmail.com]

Link to photos of the antenna

https://imgur.com/a/FaC7t6A

[Richard Fairman]

I have used Helium for lora tracking. Its very low cost and can be integrated with a Cayenne Dashboard for private and/or public sharing. 

R

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[j.r.h...@gmail.com]

Interesting I will have a look at it. As I said we have a fully separate GPS tracker module we can text when the balloon is on the ground to retrieve today's payload. 

[Steve]

Definitely sounds like a signal strength problem.  The antenna looks OKish assuming lengths are not wildly out - I'd use PTFE coax and directly solder the radials to the braiding.  The SMA connectors are often another area of failure - so check continuity and that pins have not been pushed back.

Both mobile phone tracking and LoRaWAN (TTN Helium) have issues when the payload is on the ground and out of range of the network.  For latex flights I've always found UKHAS radio tracking better once you get a reliable tracker.

    Steve

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[David Akerman]

Agreed; 240m sounds like no connection to the aerial.  I think that's the range I got once when I used an RP-SMA without noticing ...

Dave

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[j.r.h...@gmail.com]

I agree ~240m is the distance we got on SMA connector alone before plugging in and extending the range with the antenna way past the 240m mark.

 

We have the backup that we tried out on Monday successfully, I am confident we will be able to retrieve and investigate.

 

Will get a multimeter out and go see a man about a drone.  

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[John Laidler]

That's very disappointing. I guess if it flew to a high altitude and no one picked up its signals it must be the tracker at fault. 

I see your ground station thinks it is on the equator although this should make no difference. If you are using a receiver based on the Raspberry Pi you add the latitude and longitude at the start of the gateway.txt file with 2 lines "Latitude=123 Longitude=456" putting the actual values in of course. 

If you had SSDV enabled you could check at what altitude it goes to large image sizes. The default is 2000m I think but it would be a coincidence too far if yours was set to 250m.

Hope you solve the riddle.

Best wishes,

John

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[Jonathan Heirons]

Hi John,

Yeah we updated the receiver lon/lat when it was pointed out but didn’t update on the map. 

The GPS tracker has pinged so we are able to recover the payload. 

Thanks everyone for the help and I will update the mailing list when the payload is returned 

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From: uk...@googlegroups.com <uk...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of John Laidler <rjohnl...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2022 11:14:36 AM
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Subject: Re: [UKHAS] Launch Announcment - Now 30/06/2022

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