Dec 28 2013

WebSDR for 434 and 1296 MHz

For those of you out of range of the flotilla of 434 MHz balloons launched on Saturday, December 28, you can still receive the USB signals!

Noel G8GTZ, Martin G8JNJ and Phil M0DNY from the Southampton University Wireless Society, have recently set up a Microwave WebSDR near Basingstoke in the UK. It currently supports parts of the 23cm and 70cm bands, (2m is a work-in-progress) and can be listened to from anywhere in the world.

The link is: http://websdr.suws.org.uk/

A couple of notes when using the websdr:

– Please set your location in dl-fldigi to somewhere around 51.294, -1.131 so we don’t have any fake receiver lines on the map!

– Connection to the site is over a several km wifi link, so once you’ve found the signal, please switch off your waterfall view (Set to ‘blind’) to save bandwidth for others.

– The waterfall speed will also be automatically limited as the number of users increases.

Enjoy!
Phil M0DNY

Frequencies of 434 MHz USB balloons going aloft on Superlaunch Saturday, Dec 28 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

UK 434 MHz balloon aims for Poland

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

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

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/