[aprssig] > 1. Airborne APRS (William McKeehan)

[A.J. Farmer (AJ3U)]

On 10/28/05, William McKeehan <mckeehan at mckeehan.homeip.net> wrote:
> The desire for an airborne tracker results from the first launch. They did not
> get enough helium in the balloon and it nearly became a floater. It traveled a
> long way and took hours to make the trip; missing the predicted landing zone
> by miles (about 100 if I remember correctly). The only onboard APRS beacon was
> a Pocket tracker on 144.39 - the number of packets received was very low, then

I just posted a few minutes ago with reasons to put it on 144.39, and
now I read this and I see the problem you are getting at.

Now suddenly, I had the idea to maybe put it on 145.800 (same as the
ISS packet downlink frequency).  Before you guys flame me, think about
it...  There are many Satgates around the country that listen on that
frequency 24x7 for packets from the ISS.   They would pass any packets
heard to the APRS-IS so they would show on Findu.  You would still
have your chase vehicles listening, but this would give you a backup
in case something went awry and the balloon went unexpectedly out of
range of the ground crew.

The flight of your balloon would be a couple of hours at most.  Just
make sure you have your launch when there would not be an ISS pass
anytime within your balloon flight window so that there would not be a
conflict with the ISS.

Any reasons not to do this?

<flame suit donned and ready> :-)

--
A.J. Farmer, AJ3U
http://www.aj3u.com