On Saturday, May 19th, 2012 we traveled to Moses Lake, WA to launch our high altitude balloon for the ESS205 : Access to Space class at the University of Washington.
The balloon made it to over 100,000′ before popping, and coming back down to land somewhere nearby. Unfortunately we were unable to find and recover the payload, so we now hope that it has landed in a farmer’s field and will be found. Stickers placed on the payloads give our contact information, so we hope to receive a call soon!
Ordered the head extension cable and a mounting bracket for my Icom 706MKII-G last week, and they showed up in the mail on Saturday, so I had a good time on saturday afternoon figuring out how to get the rig mounted in my new car.
The main issue was finding a good space on/near the dash for the head. Unfortunately, due to the large size of the 706 head, and restrictions on where I can place it due to not wanting to put it in front of any of the air bags, I eventually came to the conclusion that the dash wasn’t right right spot for it.
Thought about putting it up in the sunglasses holder, and the head fit there, but none of the cables connecting to it would. Plus how am I gonna get the cables up there anyway.
Eventually I found that it fit nicely with lots of room for cables and whatnot inside the center console/arm rest box. Then I can run the cable under the rear seats and under the floor of the trunk to where I’d mount the body of the radio.
Then came the issue of powering the radio. I thought about how I could run power to the rear of the car from the battery, and have it look nice (seeing as it’s a shiny new car). Short of paying a professional who knows how to get the thousand trim pieces off between the battery and the cargo area, there wasn’t a whole lot I was willing to do. Though, I remembered that there’s an accessory outlet in the cargo area. It wouldn’t be able to supply enough power for transmit, but if I used it to charge a couple of small Sealed Lead Acid UPS batteries, the batteries could provide the transmit current, and the accessory outlet to supply the receive current and recharge the batteries.
Anyway, it seems to be working great, so now I’m all set to be operating mobile in my new car!
My new car hit 1,000 miles on Friday morning, so the engine is officially out of it’s “Break in period.” Granted, I got it with 213 miles on it (Must have had a good number of test drives), so really only the latter 787 miles were mine. Anyway, I’m loving it so far, so I see it as the first thousand of many.
Don’t think it needs too much explanation. We went to launch rockets. We did so. Got some great pictures. Here are some.
Recently, I went on a trip to the Black Rock desert in Nevada with a group from the University of Washington to launch some high power amateur rockets. Seeing as though this is a thirteen hour drive from Seattle down to Black Rock, a number of days out on the playa, and another thirteen hours driving back, I though it would be an interesting use of an APRS tracker.
So, I rigged up a board I had for another project, which already had a microprocessor and a GPS, with a MX614 packet modem IC and a radio interface for my yaesu handheld. Powered the whole lot off a couple of 7AH sealed lead acid batteries, and stuck a mag mount antenna on top of the vehicle.
The system I mooched for this little project also happened to have several atmospheric sensors on it. Including barometric pressure, humidity and temperature. So, with a bit of modification to my original APRS tracker code, I had it sending position packets as well as weather report packets.
Coverage out on the playa is excellent thanks to the friendly hams at the Black Rock Amateur Radio Association who maintain several digipeaters as well as a couple of voice repeaters for use in the area on and surrounding the Black Rock desert. You can visit their website at cq-blackrock.org.
Anyway, with the help from the local digipeaters, my packets from out on the playa made it out to aprs.fi from which I downloaded the data after I got back home. Which you can now get from me here: APRSFI_RAW. The all the data is in standard APRS position and weather report formats.
To bring it all to a close, here’s a picture of the setup I had.
