Dec 27 2013

UK 434 MHz balloon aims for Poland

Archive Image - Ali Al-Azzawi M0PSI with a balloon - Credit Dave Akerman M6RPI

Archive Image – Ali Al-Azzawi M0PSI with a balloon – Credit Dave Akerman M6RPI

On “Superlaunch Saturday”, December 28 a number of 434 MHz balloon launches will take place. The radio signals from the balloons should be receivable over much of the UK.

Dave Akerman M6RPI and Anthony Stirk M0UPU plan to sent a balloon transmitting live SSDV images on 434 MHz from the UK to Poland.

The Raspberry Pi powered balloon is planned to take off at 1100 UT on Saturday from Brightwalton in Berkshire. The launch will be streamed live on the Internet.

Payload:
$$SLEET 434.400 MHz RTTY 50 7N2
$$SNOW 434.410 MHz RTTY 100 7N2
$$WANNAB1 434.420 MHz DominoEX16
$$CLOUDY 434.200 MHz RTTY 300 bps Slow Scan Digital Video (SSDV)

BATC.tv stream from the launch site
http://www.batc.tv/streams/m0upu

Streaming video from Dave M6RPI cam
http://www.batc.tv/streams/hab-o-cam

Further information at http://www.daveakerman.com/?p=1457

Other 434 MHz balloons going aloft on Superlaunch Saturday can be seen at
http://ukhas.org.uk/ukhas:superlaunchsat

Real time tracking of the balloons at http://spacenear.us/tracker/

Beginners Guide to Tracking using dl-fldigi http://ukhas.org.uk/guides:tracking_guide

Slow Scan Digital Video (SSDV) Guide http://ukhas.org.uk/guides:ssdv

Check the #highaltitude IRC channel for chat about the launches
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=highaltitude

Balloon flights are always subject to last minute changes. To get up-to-date information subscribe to the UKHAS Mailing List by sending a blank email to this address:
ukhas+subscribe@googlegroups.com

Dec 27 2013

SkySat-1 satellite sends first HD video

Ching-Yu Hu - Skybox Imaging

Ching-Yu Hu – Skybox Imaging

Skybox Imaging was founded in 2009 by radio amateur Julian Mann KI6OSO along with Ching-Yu Hu, Dan Berkenstock and John Fenwick.

Many of the Skybox Imaging executives worked on CubeSat projects while students at Stanford University under Professor Bob Twiggs KE6QMD.

SkySat-1, the first in a planned constellation of 24 microsatellites, was launched on a Dnepr from Dombarovsky near Yasny on November 21, 2013. It is believed to be the smallest satellite ever flown that is capable of capturing imagery at better than 1 meter resolution and the 1080p HD camera can capture up to 90 second video clips at 30 frames per second.

Watch World’s First High-Resolution, HD Video of Earth from Space (1080p HD)

Skybox Imaging http://www.skyboximaging.com/

Dec 27 2013

Changes to FUNcube Data Warehouse Upload

AMSAT-UK FUNcube Mission Patch Rev4 20100609

AMSAT-UK FUNcube Mission Patch

We are extremely grateful to all the groups and individuals who have uploaded FUNcube-1 (AO-73) data to the warehouse and the totals on the upload ranking page are quite amazing.

Since launch we have been monitoring the service which receives, processes and stores that data and now are about to make some changes to it to improve it performance and reliability.

The first change is to introduce an acceptance time window for packets uploaded from the Dashboard. This restricts packets to those whose sequence numbers are within +/- 48 hours of the latest sequence number stored in the Data Warehouse. We are doing this for two reasons:

We have received erroneous packets whose sequence numbers are significantly different to the latest value. To reduce the chance of double scoring of points when we release stored data back to the user community

The second change, which will not affect normal operation but will improve scoring:

We currently process packets immediately they arrive at the server. Under load, this can cause us to lose a few packet scores because of contention in the database. To alleviate this problem, we are going to change the processing slightly to process packets through a buffer. This buffer will be processed every 5 seconds, so there will be a slight delay before packets are acknowledged on the ranking.

73 Dave, G4DPZ

Dashboard App – Telemetry Decoder http://funcube.org.uk/working-documents/funcube-telemetry-dashboard/

Data Warehouse – Telemetry Archive http://warehouse.funcube.org.uk/

Dec 25 2013

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from AMSAT-UK

merry_christmas-2301AMSAT-UK would like to wish all its members and friends a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year. Good Luck in 2014.

Dec 25 2013

Updated Dashboard Software now available

FUNcube-1 last test dashboard frameThe FUNcube Team are pleased to announce the latest version of the Dashboard Software.

Version 814 can be downloaded from http://funcube.org.uk/working-documents/funcube-telemetry-dashboard/

We thank everyone for their interest and reports of the success of FUNcube-1 (AO-73) and we look forward to continued operations.

Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas
73 The FUNcube Project Team

Dec 23 2013

FUNcube-1 High Resolution Graphs Available

Sun Sensors

Sun Sensors

Total Photo Current

Total Photo Current

There is now a facility to view the latest FUNcube-1 (AO-73) High Resolution Data uploaded to the Data Warehouse. The link can be found in the Navigation Bar on the warehouse.

Following on from this will be making Hi-Res data available to download via .csv files, in a similar way we do for Whole Orbit Data. Watch this space.

Seasons Greetings
Dave, G4DPZ

Battery Volts

Battery Volts

Dashboard App – Telemetry Decoder
http://funcube.org.uk/working-documents/funcube-telemetry-dashboard/

Data Warehouse – Telemetry Archive
http://warehouse.funcube.org.uk/

Satellite Tracking Apps
https://amsat-uk.org/beginners/satellite-tracking/