Balloon Launch Data

I posted here late last week about our Balloon launch, and many of you tuned in to participate. Thanks for trying out the repeater and everything! Many of you were asking about problems, and where to find information; I wanted to provide that for those interested.

First off the repeater:

While we were building the repeater, we had problems with the transmit radio getting stuck transmitting for some reason. We had thought it was because the receive and transmit radio’s coupled together or something. So we stuck a ground loop isolator on and it seemed to fix the problem. However when we assembled the payloads the antennas didn’t get far enough apart, and it looks like that caused the transmit radio to get stuck in transmit until the battery died.

Next APRS:

Some of you noticed that APRS stopped reporting once the reached a certain altitude. When I designed the system, I used a Tinytrak4 because I liked the modular nature of it, and all the settings it had. However, I realized after the launch that I had it not only sending packets but receiving packets. The tinytrak did not transmit any packets until it had 100ms of free space after receiving a packet. So as the the balloon got higher and higher, the tinytrak got more and more saturated with packets, and as a result it stopped transmitting the location. Next time I will have to take this into consideration and make it a send only system.

Finally, if you’re interested in getting some of the data or taking a look at the code for our data logger, I am putting it all on my GitHub: http://ift.tt/2fyIsf1

We are also working on uploading pictures, videos, and other fun stuff to http://starduster.info

submitted by /u/budude2
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