ON4IR Flight Reports

[Manoel Casquilho]

Hi!

I'm writing to you to thank you for your contribution for our first HAB launches!

To put things back into perspective, those launches were part of a contest organized by the Royal Meteorological Institute in Brussels, where they would launch payloads during the "Space for Climate" days (open days). Our submission was a radiation sensor for High Altitude measurements. We were selected; and the Institute asked us to help other contestants out as they didn't have any tracking solutions. We used ON4IR without suffix for our "main flight", and ON4IR-1, -2, -3 and -4 for tracking other contestant's payloads. All payloads used Horus V2 for telemetry (with a modified payload spec for ON4IR), around 434.500MHz.

We used their standard "weather" balloons: 1.5m in diameter, 1.5kg of additional lift, target height 35000m.

Everything went smoothly during those two days. We had a booth showing the telemetry to the public and explaining what our hobby and what weather sounding was; an overall positive experience. We're happy to report that we didn't have any hardware of software issue during those flights: the firmware on the RS-41 modified sondes worked beautifully, the Geiger counter didn't seem to experience any issue with the cold temperatures; the tracking infrastructure performed without a hitch.

I'd love to post pictures here, but there seems to be a size limit...

We had 3 teams of "chasers", they recovered all 5 payloads (+1 we didn't plan to, ON5RTR). Granted one of them landed in a military base (the staff there was extremely helpful and allowed us to recover the sonde), another landed on a tree at 20m of height and required two trips and 5 hours of work to recover it.

Here are the flight reports:

ON4IR: https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/d/HJgOZLq7k/basic?var-Payload=ON4IR&from=1664107264136&to=1664117917753&orgId=1
ON4IR-1: https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/d/HJgOZLq7k/basic?var-Payload=ON4IR-1&from=1664025700000&to=1664035752000&orgId=1
ON4IR-2: https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/d/HJgOZLq7k/basic?var-Payload=ON4IR-2&from=1664020499000&to=1664031105000&orgId=1
ON4IR-3: https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/d/HJgOZLq7k/basic?var-Payload=ON4IR-3&from=1664117637000&to=1664128497000&orgId=1
ON4IR-4: https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/d/HJgOZLq7k/basic?var-Payload=ON4IR-4&from=1664097811000&to=1664107285000&orgId=1

And thanks to Mark VK5QI, we now have a dashboard with the radiation measurements: https://grafana.v2.sondehub.org/d/X8_22e7Vz/on4ir-radiation-sensor?orgId=1&from=1664105577291&to=1664121181303

Huge thanks go to all the HAMs that installed a receiving station (more than 40!), thus contributing to the immense coverage we had during those two days, to Mark VK5QI for designing such an effective modulation and all the tools that now make HAB telemetry a breeze (horusdemodlib, sondehub platform, horus-gui and many more), Mikael OH3BHX for RS41ng (open-source firmware for RS-41 sondes), all the chase teams, and the Royal Meteorological Institute for allowing us to use their infrastructure !

Next year (and perhaps earlier if I can help it), we'll try something a tad more complex: DATV, cosmic ray energy measurements, cross-band repeaters, etc. We'll let you know!

Cheers,

73 de Manoel - ON6RF/ON4IR and the team: Gérald ON3GSU, Fred ON3PFD, Olivier ON3OT, Benoît ON7IO, Adrien ON9AD, Bastien ON4BCY