PSB-4 up and away!

PSB-4 lifted off in very strong wind condition yesterday

PICO launch

Solar panel worked well, the payload was powered for 5 hours until it shut down at low light, covering a distance of about 350km. Floating altitude was 6200m.

Telemetry transmission would resume when the solar panel gets enough sunlight the next day.

This was also our first field test of the new GPS module MAX-7C. It was working fine, and being very power efficient it was perfectly suitable for PICO flights.

A big thank you to everyone for assistance with tracking at a short notice. The 6200m altitude didn’t give us a good radius of radio horizon like previous flights at higher altitudes. Peter VK3XCO and VK3ZYC did a good job of getting most of the telemetry packets as the payload headed towards the Tasman.

Flight path:

PastedGraphic 9

Altitude:

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If the balloon remains afloat, predicted trajectory shows an Easterly path towards the northern part of New Zealand, and should be within reception range of Auckland around 9am Monday 7 October local time . It would be interesting to see if anyone can hear the payload again.

19778 trj001

For power saving we had the payload sending sequences of beeps at a few seconds apart, followed by telemetry packets at 434.650Mhz USB, 100baud RTTY with 440Hz shift, ASCII 8,None,1. The frequency was drifting to 434.653 the last time it was heard.

The audio beeps are very distinctive, and we’d love to hear reports of anyone who thinks they might have heard PSB-4! Please send reports to info@projectspaceballoon.net. The balloon will only transmit if the solar panel generates enough power, ie. 10am to 4pm local time.

Solar PICO

This is the first test of our solar pico

Photo

We plan to release the PICO in Ballarat today (5th Oct), to test out the Solar panel, and light weight payload on a foil balloon. At 15g including solar panel this is our lightest payload so far.

Photo

The max expected altitude is around 6000/7000m so we are not sure what the radio reception radius will be, will call out to the mailing lists for help if this starts looking promising!

We don’t expect to recover this payload if it stays up for a while.

The tracking telemetry is as previous flights:

434.650Mhz USB, 100baud RTTY, ASCII 8,None,1

Tracking on spacenear.us as PSB-4 http://spacenear.us/tracker/

We are back!

After a brief period of absence we are now back with a new web site. Sorry for the lack of updates, it should be better now that we have updated the site structure to make things simpler! We are looking at releasing a PICO payload in the next few weeks, amongst other things that we want to do. Here is a photo of the proposed PICO payload.

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Thanks to Anthony Stirk from UKHAS, Mark VK5QI from Project Horus and the guys on #highaltitude for giving us the inspiration to develop our own trackers.