The Olde Towne Middle School Radio and Technology Club from Ridgeland, MS is proud to be launching what is most likely the state’s first near-space balloon from a non-college school! The launch status is GO for right now and the weather is looking breezy but good. The students rigged up a practice payload chain today and everything was tested and is working great! We want reception reports from both HF and VHF modes. We are going to plot all reception reports so the students can see where the signals were in relation to our location.
The AmateurLogic.TV crew plan on attending and taping the event.
Date: Saturday March, 26
Time: setup 7:45am Central time with a launch between 9:00 and 9:30am
Central time
Location: Madison County Career and Technical Center, Madison, MS
Here are all of the transmitters and beacons:
· APRS – Argent Data Systems Balloon Module
144.390 with a call sign of KC5NXD-11
· VHF Voice Beacon – DF Doppler Instruments – Special message
from one of our members
146.565 FM simplex (theoretical range is about 400 miles at
altitude)
· HF Telemetry Module – designed and constructed by WB8ELK
– 14.079 USB with a +1500 on the digital waterfall. The optimum program is a specially modified Fldigi called dl-fldigi which you can download at http://code.google.com/p/dl-fldigi/
When configured correctly it will send telemetry to a server to track online.
Telemetry is in 4 modes 2 of which are full streams
Domino-ex16 full telemetry
RTTY is 8-bit ASCII 110 baud full telemetry
CW – altitude
Hellschreiber – Altitude
If you receive telemetry stream after the balloon has landed please email it to [email protected].
For the latest on the launch follow us on twitter under the name kc5nxd.
We will attempt to stream live video from ustream.comwith the username kc5nxd.
