Yesterday morning, Saturday, March 31st, Hams helped students & teachers from the Lehman High School Radio Club launch a small weather balloon from the school, about 2 miles ENE of Kyle, Texas, running APRS using the Call Sign of NN5RR-11. (Track it here online) It landed a few hours later at 1.3 miles East bearing 76° from Martindale, in Caldwell County, Texas. Raw tracking info can be viewed here.
The weather cooperated for an 9am launch of a small test balloon on Saturday morning. It was picked up by digipeaters and I-Gates and appeared on aprs.fi. Ross Russell, NN5RR, was the instigator of the flight, and pre-flight planning was shared via the HCHams Yahoo group.
Because of the risk of losing the payload for this test flight, they kept the cost down by using the Byonics MT-RTG TNC/2m transmitter combo and a cheap HD camcorder.
This was just a test flight in preparation for a larger flight around the end of April or early May. That next big flight with a larger balloon & payload, is expected to have a live amateur TV feed (analog) with lots of sensors, telemetry, and science experiments.
It’s only a 500g balloon, which the company recommended first-timers use to learn how to handle big latex balloons and payloads. It went up to about 85,000 feet before popping & parachuting safely down with the HD video camera & tracker.
Ross reported on the flight Saturday night…
“Wooo, that was fun! Couldn’t’ve done it w/o Phil KD5MMM, who works the back roads like it’s nobody’s business! It rose to over 85,000 feet, and parachuted down to near Martindale, no damage, and with hours of HD video intact. The plexiglass window froze over at altitude and blocked most of the high-altitude vid but that was one test I needed to do.
“Pretty amazing getting digipeated from south of Huntsville and from DeSoto, south of Dallas. Down in Devine, TX too.”
Here’s the URL: http://www.loboradio.com/amateur_radio/balloon_flights/lrc-0/journal1.html
Ross/NN5RR
See image of flight pattern below…
APRS Tracking of Balloon
