[UKHAS] Pico SSDV flight.

[Steve]

Hi Folks - in a couple of weeks I'm expecting to fly a pico balloon
carrying a lightweight camera transmitting SSDV on 434MHz.  Its based on
an ESP32CAM  that Mike Sharps / Kev Walton previously developed.  It's
compatible with PITS lora gateways - Mode 1 using the license exempt
434.04MHz - 434.79MHz  band running 10mW in a 25KHz channel.

My question is who has PITS lora gateways that they can fire up? and
approximately where are they located? - - I'm particularly interested
for sites in mainland Europe - so  I can plan which direction I should
send my flight.  Are there any particular frequencies to avoid in your area?

    Steve G8KHW


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[Chrischan Klamm]

hello Steve! Please write your plans in the following Telegram group, there are some interested people there (:
t.me/horus_flights

Christian

> Am 16.02.2025 um 22:45 schrieb Steve <st...@randomaerospace.com>:
>
> Hi Folks - in a couple of weeks I'm expecting to fly a pico balloon carrying a lightweight camera transmitting SSDV on 434MHz. Its based on an ESP32CAM that Mike Sharps / Kev Walton previously developed. It's compatible with PITS lora gateways - Mode 1 using the license exempt 434.04MHz - 434.79MHz band running 10mW in a 25KHz channel.

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[Ross G6GVI]

Hi Steve, I had noticed you testing over recent weeks and wondered what you were planning.

We're maybe not within range of your pico flight, but there are a few of us in the Manchester & Merseyside area who will be watching with interest.

I have a Pi LoRa Gateway (version 1.10.6), but the others use LoRa serial boards connected via USB to the HAB Base Manager: I ran that latter setup for Dave's Babbage Bear flight last summer (on 869MHz) and found a problem with its SSDV uploads locking up, but I believe that Dave has fixed this in version 1.7.10.

That ISM band is quite busy around here, but many of the signals are on a 25kHz channel raster.

73 de Ross G6GVI

[Mike Sharps]

Be fascinating to see how that all goes Steve. Best of luck with it.

Mike

[Mika Köching]

Hi Steve!

I'd also recommend the telegram group.

I'd be happy to set up a decoder. When you launch, just do an announcement here and I will set up a receiver!

I'm also currently planning on setting up a permanent Horus and LoRa receiver.

73s de Mika, DL8MIK

[Lee West]

I have a PI and Lora board I can activate up here in Lincolnshire with a few days' notice if it's coming this way.

Cheers

Lee G4TNX

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[Matt Taylor]

I'm up in Leeds and have my LoRa Gateway and HAMamp always on standby for LoRa launches. Not the best receiving location (in a bit of a dip) but I'll be receiving and hoping it reaches a good altitude :) 

- Matt M0XIN

On Sun, 16 Feb 2025 at 21:45, Steve <st...@randomaerospace.com> wrote:

[James Bell]

I have a Lora receiver in London that im happy to turn on (though dont imagine you would be flying over!) 

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[Steve]

Thanks - I took a bit too long to enter the captcha and now I'm banned by admin - perhaps you ca get me un-banned?

    Steve G8KHW

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[David Brooke]

Hi Steve,

On Sun, Feb 16, 2025 at 09:45:45PM +0000, Steve wrote:
>
> My question is who has PITS lora gateways that they can fire up? and
> approximately where are they located? - - I'm particularly interested for
> sites in mainland Europe - so  I can plan which direction I should send my
> flight.  Are there any particular frequencies to avoid in your area?

My Rx is ready to go in N.Cambs, so should be able to get the early part
of the flight.

I recall that in the Netherlands (in particular, though likely also
elsewhere) frequencies with 12.5kHz offset are preferred as the 25kHz
spot frequencies can be busy with cranes etc.

David G6GZH

[Chrischan Klamm]

hi Steve, I added you (:

Christian

> Am 18.02.2025 um 12:23 schrieb David Brooke <goo...@dbrooke.me.uk>:
>
> Hi Steve,

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[Steve]

Thanks guys - I'm probably going to go with 434.3375MHz - unless someone
has a specific reason why not.

    Steve G8KHW

[Dan Bowen]

This sounds really cool Steve!

Cheers,
Dan

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[Sasha Tim]

Hi Steve!

Any updates on the flight?

--VE3SVF

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[Josh Atkins]

I have a working SSDV encoder on Adafruit Feather RFM95 using Arducam SPI 5MP.

The encoder reads, encodes, and transmits on a macroblock-by-macroblock basis, so in principle images of any size can be transmitted.

Additionally, I have a working prototype of a vector-based codec that could theoretically operate over ZigBee (~21 Kbps throughput); but on real-life scenes it looks like clipart from Office 2000.

If anyone is interested in collaborating (Dan, Steve, et al.), that's a real possibility.

Josh

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[Steve]

My flight is put back - I concluded that WeNet is more often used European mainland - which is where my flight is almost certainly going.  So I'm currently porting WeNet TX to the ESP32CAM + SX1276 + NMEA GPS (Arduino).  So far I have got it sending telemetry messages - and I am working on SSDV at the mo. My ultimate aim is to run a combination of Wenet and LoRa - maybe License exempt 10mW LoRa in the UK and 50mW Wenet after crossing the north sea.

Wenet TX is currently implemented on a raspberry pi (linux), pi camera uBlox GPS and SX1276 - with the RX running on RTL-SDR + linux computer.  Images are SSDV format and uploaded to ssdv.habhub.org.

Wenet is quite interesting and could (with change) be used for low bitrate video - the effective bitrate is currently around 68Kbps - after error correction.   The RX would have to recognize video packets (new message type)  and send those to a server for processing back into (say) http live streaming (or Youtube live stream). The multiple WeNet receivers reducing the number of missing packets. The over the air video protocol would still have to cope with missing packets gracefully. 

A further step would be to improve the Wenet transmission protocol by going to MFSK (its currently 2-FSK)  and removing the current UART overhead - maybe double the bitrate or more.

    Steve G8KHW

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[Sasha Tim]

Cool, let us know how it goes! Wenet on an ESP32CAM sounds exciting!

A friend of mine figured out how to push live video over these FSK modules, see https://www.scd31.com/posts/real-time-balloon-video.

--VE3SVF

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