Tuesday 7 May 2013

High Altitude Balloon Telemetry Updates

Several weeks ago I discovered the excitement of decoding high altitude balloon (HAB) telemetry.

As I blogged I spent a enjoyable couple of hours receiving the STRATODEAN project telemetry and submitting the received data to HABHubs habitat which is a system created to allow uploading, processing, storing and displaying telemetry and related information transmitted from the various high altitude balloons.

Mark and Cassie (the Stratodean team) have since uploaded a video on their blog showing the preparations, launch, flight and recovery of the payload.


Over the bank holiday weekend there were two other balloons launches planned, Chris Stubb's (M6EDF) CHEAPO (webpage) and Steve Randall's (G8KHW) XABEN-49 flights due.

CHEAPO did indeed fly, but sadly I didn't receive anything as the signal was apparently very weak. I was also suffering some strong interference around the chosen frequency. I did have more success with XABEN-49 receiving a strong signal and a lot of telemetry packets. Though I did have to tweak the RTTY decode parameters in Dl-Fldigi, principally widening the shift and the filter widths, since the auto-configure option was setting it too narrow.

This morning the Essex Ham website has posted a nice video on their website explaining a bit more how to go about HAB decoding.



While investigating the habitat system I found the stats page and flight pie charts, showing the top receivers for each flight, I was pleased to see I featured quite high in the chart for the XABEN-49 flight, and indeed for the STRATODEAN flight last month.

XABEN-49 Telemetry Stats

STRATODEAN Telemetry Stats



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