Signals from Space Annapolis Royal Students Learn Ham Radio for June Launch

Annapolis West Education Centre student Abigail Bonnington holds a video camera hardly bigger than a sugar cube. It's attached to a small transmitter that will send signal to a laptop. It stopped working and now Penney and Bonnington are troubleshooting. It has to be operational or replaced by sometime in June when the Annapolis Royal Space Agency launches its second 'package' deep into the stratosphere -- 30 or 40 kilometres up. Penney is with the Annapolis Valley Amateur Radio Club and has been working with the students since the fall. "I was approached by them to see if amateur radio had any part to play in their balloon project, and of course it does," said Penney. "We can provide location information, pictures, telemetry -- things like that -- live TV picture. And the ground search team can use radio to keep in touch and coordinate searching for the balloon." It was Bonnington, a space agency veteran, who got in touch with the ham radio club and asked for help. "So we came down and gave them the talk on amateur radio and they were suitably impressed and decided it would be nice to work together," said Penney. So ham radio is the new thing in this year's project. With no cell signal or any type of WiFi up in space, radio signal is the only thing that works to send live TV back to Earth. Or as Penney says: "A live video camera connected to a transmitter that will operate the amateur radio bands and will transmit a picture back to mission control here. Live TV -- from the edge of space."

from Ham Radio Times http://ift.tt/2relZZn
via IFTTT