[OZAPRS] Project Horus Repeater Flight this Sunday

[vk5gr at bigpond.com]

Nik and everyone,

An update on the Project Horus flight this weekend.

The flight on Sunday will include as one of the payloads a cross band FM repeater attached to the balloon. To work the repeater and have a contact with AREG net control via the balloon you will need to operate on the following:

Uplink to the Balloon:  438.900MHz FM + 123Hz CTCSS
Downlink to listen to the Balloon: 144.650MHz FM (in the experimental segment)

VK5ARG will operate net control on the balloon repeater to help keep contacts orderly and hopefully help manage some of the FM capture overload problems we saw on the uplink when we last flew this payload on  Horus 9.

VK5ARG-11 will also fly on APRS on 145.175 - beaconing to WIDE2-1 (so that it makes it into an I-Gate)

The balloon will also have 434.075 MHz 300Baud RTTY telemetry running, which can be decoded via the FL-Digi software (referred to on the http://projectHorus.org website) which can also help us with the distributed listener network for collecting telemetry and relaying it back to the cars.

All up - a very busy ham radio payload.  Chase cars will be VK5ZM/GR and VK5VKI/QI. Tracking will be available via aprs.fi as well as spacenear.us/tracker

As mentioned on the original post, the mission will be scrubbed if it is going to land where we cant retrieve it, but at this stage the predictions look good for landing in the Mallee district in SA.

I'll post another update when we get closer to launch!

Regards,
Grant VK5GR
For Project Horus