PSB-6 and PSB-7 will be our first HAB releases of the year over the weekend of 18-19/1/2014, when we will launch two balloons from Southern NSW.

The first balloon will have SSDV, RTTY, APRS and spread spectrum on VHF/UHF. The second one will have THOR4, JT65 and WSPR on HF, and SSDV on UHF. We are expecting 30,000m altitude on both balloons.

Spread spectrum transmission will be on our new tracker, using Zachary Manchester implementation for project KickSat ( See here for project details ). The binary 0s and 1s are modulated with two 511-bit Gold sequences before transmitted at 64kbps using MSK. As confirmed by Zac, this will be how the Sprite spacecrafts will transmit after launch. Our payload telemetry will alternate between RTTY and Gold codes on 434.075Mhz.

This will be the first flight for our new pico tracker:

Reception of the Gold codes will require GNURadio, and a supported SDR receiver (RTL or Funcube should work). Zac has some instructions on installation here. He is in transition from using Gnuradio 3.6 to 3.7 so the installation script will require some tweaking. If you are familiar with Linux or have used GNUradio this should be straight forward.

The HF transmissions will be time-scheduled as previously done on PSB-5, minus 40m band.

Transmissions in the first half of the hour (minute 0-29) will be on 30m, and 20m on the second half of the hour (minute 30-59). In each 10 minute block the sequence will be THOR4 (5 minutes), JT65 (2 minutes) and WSPR (2 minutes).

We will have test transmissions from Melbourne on HF and UHF from time to time in the next few weeks, and would appreciate any test reports or comments. Please include your location in the test reports, and send them to info@projectspaceballoon.net

Hope to see you on the launch days