Project Horus FM Rptr Balloon Flight on Sun 15th April 2012

[VK5GR]

Hi everyone,

A quick update from Project Horus – Horus 23 should lift off sometime around 10.30-11.00am ACST this morning (around 0100 UTC). Predictions have the flight lasting 2.5hrs and flying 80km down range in an easterly direction from Mt Barker. We hope to hit at least 30km altitude so the radio horizon should reach Melbourne.

The voice repeater frequencies on the balloon are:

438.900 MHz Uplink with 123Hz CTCSS (FM)
144.650 MHz downlink (FM)

Net control is VK5ARG.

APRS will fly as VK5ARG-11 on 145.175 – via WIDE2-1

300baud RTTY telemetry will fly on 434.075 +/- 5kHz

Chase teams will be VK5VZI, VK5ZM and VK5ZSN.

Regards,
Grant VK5GR (part of the VK5ZM team)

[VK2GFR]

Hi Trash (et al),
Not that I'm a pesermist (yea right), but I'll fire-up the 1250FM ATV Rx & turn the antennas in a Nor-Westerly direction.
If as has been stated with 300 plus km range should get a snif of some piccies into Sydney (if the signal can get through the smog)
Only running an 8 over 8 ant with a long feeder cable.
Best of luck to all enthusiasts!!

[VK5PJ]

Hi,
if you want to follow any of the Horus balloon's via their telemetry and beacons, go to these URL's and follow the setup instructions. You need the SPECIAL version of the FL-Digi software that has been adapted for uploading the decoded balloon telemetry to a remote web site.
Use the 70cm radio in USB mode for decoding the Horus telemetry.

Setup instruction:
http://projecthorus.org/?page_id=336

Software download:
https://github.com/jamescoxon/dl-fldigi/downloads to select a version, OR
https://github.com/downloads/jamescoxon ... r115.1.exe for the windows (all version) installer package.

hope to hear you all on the voice repeater, as per Grants instructions.

[VK5ZD]

Hi all

For anyone planning to chase the HORUS balloon, I noticed the following NOTAM which will be occurring in the vicinity of the predicted landing area:

HIGH PWR ROCKET LAUNCHING
NEAR KAROONDA SOUTH AUSTRALIA
BRG 071 MAG 26NM FM TAILEM BEND 'TBD' VOR
SFC TO 8500FT AMSL
FROM 04 142230 TO 04 150530

I'm going to watch while waiting for the balloon.

73
Iain

[VK5QI]

Hi,
if you want to follow any of the Horus balloon's via their telemetry and beacons, go to these URL's and follow the setup instructions.

Please use this version of dl-fldigi (Windows): https://github.com/downloads/jamescoxon ... r115.1.exe
Once installed, open the program with the 'HAB Mode' shortcut it should have installed. You should then be able to select 'HORUS' from the drop-down list of flights.

You need to be using dl-fldigi to be able to access the auto-configure options, and to be able to upload received sentences to the distributed listener system.

- Mark VK5QI

[VK2AVR]

A few of my friends and I bought military surplus geiger meters but they only measure high level radiation (levels that would kill you).

If you bought the ones from Oatley electronics... you're notice that the meter's are radioactive. They have radium painted dials.

it was an ebay special, but what a russian thing to do. make radiation meter, paint it with radioactive substance

[VK2AVR]

looks like a couple of very successful flights by the Tamworth guys, well done Ash et al. Will check up on the Adelaide flight later, good luck fellas

[VK5GR]

HORUS 23 is in the air!

[VK2XSO]

I'm watching it, but not hearing anything from it (yet). 33,000 metres at the moment.

Some video snippets from yesterday.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3kzM8sD ... AAAAAAAAAA

[VK5QI]

Well, the payloads have landed and been recovered successfully!

We had around 40-50 unique stations call in on the repeater, with about 70 contacts logged.

We're still compiling the list (in the back of a car at the moment), and will publish some visualisations of the data when we're done.

Keep watching the Project Horus blog, as that's where it'll all be published.

- Mark VK5QI

[VK5GR]

Hi everyone,

Firstly I want to say thanks to all who helped make the flight of Horus 23 a success today. Lots of people were feeding telemetry into the network for us which is greatly appreciated. A special thankyou also to the ground crew who were involved in flying the balloon and repeater. A lot of behind the scenes work goes into these flights, with each one taking up to 2-3 weeks to plan and execute, including a lot of late nights so a big thankyou to everyone involved. Thanks also to our AREG net control station VK5ARG who kept the repeater traffic orderly.

Secondly, I hope people who made contacts via the repeater or watched APRS, or tried listening to the 25mW 70cm RTTY telemetry beacon had some fun too! After all, thats why we did it!

Thanks also for all the kind comments on this forum. It looks like it stirred up a lot of positive interest in experimenting within the amateur community which is great to see.

There have been several people ask me about video of the day's activities. I do have some that was shot across the day. I'll admit I don’t have as much as I would have originally planned, mostly as we were pretty busy doing it to stop and film it, however we do have some launch film and more importantly some landing film too. The balloon decent rate in the end was a very slow 1m/s, and gave us ample opportunity to capture a few shots as it flew over our heads just NE of Peake in the Murray Mallee country of SA. We also captured it touching down. I will edit the flight documentary film and upload it to the project's Vimeo channel in a few days. Meanwhile, you can see some film from our other flights at http://www.vimeo.com/channels/projecthorus. The project website should also be updated with all of the details about today's activities so keep watching http://www.projecthorus.org/ for both the video and blog updates!

Future Flights

The next time the repeaters will probably fly will in fact be the Sunday of the WIA AGM in Mildura (we have received CASA approval to launch from there) so look out for that flight as well. We may re-look at the repeater operating frequencies too as it seems we still may have some problems there with the machine interfering with itself. Launching from Mildura will also give us the potential to have amateurs in Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra and potentially even Sydney access the repeater, as well as the NW tip of Tasmania. That should add an extra dimension to that flight. The catch of course is that it can only reach all of those places at apogee, a height where the balloon doesn’t linger very long - perhaps 30 minutes maximum. This will be something people will need to be mindful of as "dogpiles" and FM usually don’t work out very well . APRS will also fly on that flight.

So look out for Project Horus' Amateur Radio payloads again on Sunday 27th of May!

Regards,
Grant VK5GR
For the Project Horus team

[VK2XSO]

Ah ! Some good edited video. Not my work. Somebody has a possible future in video production



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4VA5gpI ... ture=inbox

[VK2GOM]

Nice glory at about 1:40 into the video!

73 - Rob VK2GOM / G0MOH

[VK2BLS]

Absolutely fantastic effort guys. Will be following & monitoring & hoping for big winds towards VK2

[VK2HRX]

Yep, this HAB stuff is fantastic. I'm serioulsy thinking of getting to Mildura just to look at one go up.

Compton
VK2HRX
Occassional VK2 Horus tracker

[VK5GR]

Folks,

The Horus 23 documentary is now up for people to watch. See it here http://vimeo.com/40771342.

Regards,
Grant VK5GR

[VK3BQ]

nicely put together, do you have enough weight load to chuck a go pro camera up for the next trip?

[VK5ZD]

Email just received:

Hi all,

Apologies for the late notice - we'll be flying a small test launch tomorrow (Tuesday the 15th of May) around 1pm local time (GMT+ 9.5).
If anybody is available to decode telemetry, help would (as always) be greatly appreciated. Telemetry will be broadcast on 434.075MHz.
Any queries, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Terry & the rest of the Project Horus team.

Iain