CHNSA

Our official call signs finally came through … Our call signs are

Todd – VK2FABX
Mark – VK2FABZ

We also received a certificate of competency which will hang proudly on the wall

We are very excited to take delivery  our new radio a Kenwood D710A. We purchased it off a fellow amateur named Will from ACT (thank Will)

It is a dual band radio which fully supports APRS  and has a GPS that plugs into the head unit. This amazing radio will mount in our chase car and will let us listen and decode the APRS  packets in real time from our primary tracking on the balloon giving us its exact gps co-ordinates + altitude while its in the air.

Kenwood D710A

We probably have a bit of work ahead of us to learn and harness the features of this radio but I dont think we can go to far wrong with this rig.

We will try to set this up as a base station at home to while we test aprs functionality and get used to using the radio

In Australia we need to be licenced to use APRS for balloon tracking. Over the last few weeks we have been studying for the foundation amateur radio license . The foundation licence is the entry level licence for an amateur radio operator.

Today both Mark and I sat the theory, regulation and practical exams for the foundation licence.  We are happy to report that we both passed with flying colours

We have sent off all the paperwork and now will wait for our callsigns.  It will be somthing like VK2F???

This will let us get an amateur radio and get used to operating it before we start chasing balloons.

To operate with digital data over radio (APRS) we need to study and sit for the next level of licence, the Standard Amateur Radio Licence.

We are still working on the backup tracking until we get our licenses for amateur radio and can start work on our primary aprs tracking.

We are expecting temperatures of -50 degrees C at altitude and SPOT’s operating range is only down to -30 degrees C. Our initial hamster ball SPOT container has lots of holes to let all that cold air in,  and being plastic is heavy. So we want to host it inside a expanded polystyrene container. Polystyrene is a good insulator and very light, inside the enclosed  container we can use chemical warmers to keep the inside air temp above -30 degrees C and SPOT operating.

The test is to see if  SPOT will work through a  the expanded polystyrene. A simple test is to setup the SPOT in follow-me tracking mode when it was  completely covered in 30mm polystyrene.

SPOT under expanded polystyrene container

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On the 30th of January,as part of my homework , I tested Spot. I went to school and put the Spot in the middle of the basketball court and pressed the i’m OK button. Then I showed my class the Spot website and on the map where I pressed the i’m OK button. The Spot was approximately 5m off.

The red cross is where the spot was, and the arrow is where the Spot thought it was.

The Spot works by receiving signals from the GPS satellites and uses triangulation to work out where it is. (more…)