While JB was reminiscing, I was developing some new skills.
Along with some gentle encouragement from Mr Ronan, (aka my dad). Which often sounded very like “What the fsck are you doing that for”?
To use that old chestnut, a lot done, more to do.
An email from Sven Grahn arrived in my inbox (from a mailing list) over the weekend. Along with other satellite monitors, he is doing some cool stuff. I really need to get my act together and get building some aerials. This may be the encouragement that is needed.
I read this earlier and went looking for information on UX-19.
“Amateurs at the University of Tennessee Amateur Radio Club are launching a balloon with a beacon in the 10 MHz Amateur Band that may travel across the Atlantic during its 5-day mission.
The latest Icarus X mission UX-19, will hopefully launch by next weekend and its goal is to be the first Amateur Radio equiped helium balloon to cross the Atlantic.
The balloon payload will include a GPS unit and CPU that will regulate the balloon’s altitude and send telemetry on 10.123 MHz in CW and RTTY formats.
The 10 MHz transmitter will run 3 watts output into a half wave dipole hung below the balloon.
The students need receiving stations to copy the telemetry data. They have developed a decoding program that anyone can download from the University of Tennessee web site which will relay the values back to the campus server.”
They have quite a cool video from an earlier launch:
The Distributed Tracking and Relay Client (DTRC) application is interesting, as it should be possible to receive reports from anywhere in the world that the signal is received. This means that the students have a very large potential network of ground stations. Their demonstration of the DTRC client seems to be running on a MAC, so I guess it should work fine on parallels. I must try it out later and see if it does.
Random thoughts — Mostly Amateur Radio, Satellite, Linux or Work related.
