[OZAPRS] Project Horus Repeater Flight

[Grant VK5GR]

Hi everyone,

Firstly I want to say thanks to all who helped make the flight of Horus 23 a
success today. Lots of people were feeding telemetry into the network for us
which is greatly appreciated. A special thankyou also to the ground crew who
were involved in flying the balloon and repeater. A lot of behind the scenes
work goes into these flights, with each one taking up to 2-3 weeks to plan
and execute, including a lot of late nights so a big thankyou to everyone
involved. Thanks also to our AREG net control station VK5ARG who kept the
repeater traffic orderly.

Secondly, I hope people who made contacts via the repeater or watched APRS,
or tried listening to the 25mW 70cm RTTY telemetry beacon had some fun too!
After all, thats why we did it! :-)

Thanks also for all the kind comments on this list. It looks like it stirred
up a lot of positive interest in experimenting within the amateur community
which is great to see.

There have been several people ask me about video of the day's activities. I
do have some that was shot across the day. I'll admit I don't have as much
as I would have originally planned, mostly as we were pretty busy doing it
to stop and film it, however we do have some launch film and more
importantly some landing film too. The balloon decent rate in the end was a
very slow 1m/s, and gave us ample opportunity to capture a few shots as it
flew over our heads just NE of Peake in the Murray Mallee country of SA. We
also captured it touching down. I will edit the flight documentary film and
upload it to the project's Vimeo channel in a few days. Meanwhile, you can
see some film from our other flights at
http://www.vimeo.com/channels/projecthorus.

Future Flights

The next time the repeaters will probably fly will in fact be the Sunday of
the WIA AGM in Mildura (we have received CASA approval to launch from there)
so look out for that flight as well. We may re-look at the repeater
operating frequencies too as it seems we still may have some problems there
with the machine interfering with itself. Launching from Mildura will also
give us the potential to have amateurs in Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra and
potentially even Sydney access the repeater, as well as the NW tip of
Tasmania. That should add an extra dimension to that flight. The catch of
course is that it can only reach all of those places at apogee, a height
where the balloon doesn't linger very long - perhaps 30 minutes maximum.
This will be something people will need to be mindful of as "dogpiles" and
FM usually don't work out very well :-). APRS will also fly on that flight. 

So look out for Project Horus' Amateur Radio payloads again on Sunday 27th
of May!

Regards,
Grant VK5GR
For the Project Horus team