Dave's Amateur Radio Page - KA5J.COM - Tulsa, OK
Balloon Launch 11/25/2009
My son Colin is studying Engineering at Oklahoma State University, and his Intro to Engineering class launched a balloon the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to carry aloft sensors they built to gather altitude, temperature and barometric pressure data.
The ASTRO-15 project page has details including the projected flight path and tracking frequencies. When the balloon was launched, this page at findu.com displayed the current location and altitude of the balloon. It was projected to achieve an altitude of over 85,000 feet before it burst and descended to Earth.
The balloon had APRS equipment on board to enable tracking. Since I have APRS tracking capability in the car, I was invited to help chase the balloon with Colin to find it and bring it back to retrieve the data. What a great experience for me!
UPDATE: A post-launch update has been posted at Astro-15 Post Flight Update page with cool pictures captured while in flight. It reached an altitude of 100,013 feet!
APRS
Links at Google Maps, OpenAPRS, aprsworld.net (more map choices), or aprs.he.fi (more location detail) to display my mobile APRS station current location.
D-Star
I'm active on D-Star with an Icom IC-91AD and monitor 145.67 simplex in Digital Voice (DV) mode. There are currently no D-Star repeaters in Tulsa. The closest repeaters are in
NE Oklahoma City, Ozark (SW Missouri Springfield area), Kansas City, and
St. Louis.
A good source of information on D-Star is the
Texas Interconnect Team website in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
A few open source D-Star projects:
DV-DONGLE is an adapter you can use to connect to D-Star gateways around the world with your computer enabling you to talk to other D-Star users without a D-Star radio. The DV-DONGLE is available for purchase at HRO. Search for dv-dongle under "Model".
Satoshi Projects by Satoshi Yasuda 7M3TJZ/AD6GZ are hardware adapters to use an analog 9600 baud rig on D-Star.
D-STAR GMSK Node Adapter Yahoo Group supporting the Satoshi Project board.
W9ARP D-STAR Hot Spot Software to create a D-Star Hotspot using the Satoshi Project board.
G4ULF's Linux D-Star Project - an open source D-Star repeater.
JNOS
I'm in the beginning stages of setting up a JNOS node in Tulsa to learn how it operates in order to become proficient in passing emergency traffic should the need arise. My address is 44.78.08.40 and my hostname is ka5j.ampr.org.
Weather Pages
Weather Conditions at the house
My CWOP Weather Observation Page and My CWOP site information
Links
Major Computer Publication (Linux Journal) Devotes January 2010 Issue to Amateur Radio. The articles are available for download here.