Project Space Balloon 5 - Flight

PSB5 has been flown. The device was launched at around 11:30am north west of Bendigo and I was able to track the device from around 12:30 when it was heigh enough to be seen from home. The path was very different from that expected when they ran the prediction 2 weeks ago, the device headed upwards and traveled north west from Bendigo slowly, very little wind. The device reached around 18km before popping just before 5pm, landing somewhere near the town of Boort. Last message received from bendigo was at 4:48pm. around 100km of ground distance covered in ~5 ½ hrs.

My UHF rig did most of the work. running the fldigi software decoding the RTTY and SSDV image data.

I was also able to connect my ft817 to my HF antenna and Signalink and a second computer and decode WSPR on 10MHz. I only managed one decode, around 3:40pm local time. but I got a HF HAB decode :D. it would have been good to do more HF work, but the various modes and jumping frequencies wasn’t super easy, thus I just focused on what I knew worked, (wspr).

Thanks PSB guys for running this launch. was fun to follow.

Some screen shots and a video of the UHF decode.