Balloons & things

It has been a bank holiday this weekend - and weirdly hasn't been too wet. Well, actually it poured with rain on Saturday. Anyway,  there were a number of high-altitude balloon launches on Saturday and again today. More information can be found here but I don't know where that page gets archived. Another good link is here. I could pick up all 4 balloons from today when they got reasonably high - and when I switch my yagi to be in V pol - d'oh! (Using one of my RTL_SDR receivers). I'm having difficulty in getting dl-fldigi to decode the output via pulse audio (it works if I save the stream to an 8k samps/s WAV file and then replay that in dl-fldigi) - I'm sure there are better ways to connect 2 programs. I shall explore further and see what I can do. its not helped by my recent transition to GnuRadio 3.7 which seems to have broken a lot.

In other areas I've got my stepper motor working with my beaglebone black - now just have to get the rest of the engineering sorted.

Updates and things....

Here's the latest I've got from Aeneas from the pass today at around 13:45UTC:

AFSK1200: fm KE6YFA-1 to CQ-0 via TELEM-0 UI  pid=F0
4341455255531D0040020006190B0611391424050000001000F07500007013004900398341A5C5
AFSK1200: fm KE6YFA-1 to CQ-0 via TELEM-0 UI  pid=F0
4341455255531D0040020006190B0611392824050000001000F07500007013004900398341CEC4
AFSK1200: fm KE6YFA-1 to CQ-0 via TELEM-0 UI  pid=F0
4341455255531D0040020006190B06113A0024050000001000F07500007013004900398341C764
AFSK1200: fm KE6YFA-1 to CQ-0 via TELEM-0 UI  pid=F0
4341455255531D0040020006190B06113A1424050000001000F07500007013004900398341119C
AFSK1200: fm KE6YFA-1 to CQ-0 via TELEM-0 UI  pid=F0
4341455255531D0040020006190B06113A2824050000001000F075000070130049003983417A9D

And here's some from the pass yesterday (3rd Aug) at around 13:30UTC:

AFSK1200: fm KE6YFA-1 to CQ-0 via TELEM-0 UI  pid=F0
4341455255531D0040020006180B0511271424050000001000F075000070130049C0004D41AD4C
AFSK1200: fm KE6YFA-1 to CQ-0 via TELEM-0 UI  pid=F0
4341455255531D0040020006180B0511272824050000001000F075000070130049C0004D41C64D
AFSK1200: fm KE6YFA-1 to CQ-0 via TELEM-0 UI  pid=F0
4341455255531D0040020006180B0511280024050000001000F075000070130049C0004D410E83
AFSK1200: fm KE6YFA-1 to CQ-0 via TELEM-0 UI  pid=F0
4341455255531D0040020006180B0511281424050000001000F075000070130049C0004D41D87B

also STRaND-1 has been a strong signal (25-30dB above noise), but I've not yet sorted out the decode of it yet.

I've continued to work on my groundstation software and now have a working Doppler correction gnuradio block. I've made a bunch of improvements to the GUI and should have something pushed to github in the next month or two. One of the features I've added is a frequency against time plot which allows you to have multiple channels receiving different sats with different modes & Doppler corrections applied.

I'm still working on getting my beaglebone black working with my rtl-sdr receiver to make a PoE powered remote device - the main issue I'm having is updating the OS to be debian so I can easily put all of the dependencies - I know have a way forward with this - but not the time to do it!