ARLA/CLUSTER: Tentativa transatlântica de radio-balão em 7 MHz

[João Gonçalves Costa]

7MHz balloon trans-Atlantic attempt

The balloon Speedball-1 should be attempting a crossing of the Atlantic on Friday UT (Thursday evening ET) and it'll be carrying a 7.102MHz USB Amateur Radio beacon.

The launch will hopefully take place on Friday, March 25 at 0100 UT (Thursday, March 24 at 9PM Eastern Time) from Space Port Indiana, in Columbus IN. If weather conditions are not favourable further launch attempts will be made on Saturday and Sunday UT. 

It is expected to take between 36 and 72 hours to complete the crossing with a landing in either Southern Europe or North Africa.

The 40m beacon is capable of transmitting both RTTY and DominoEX and the free software dl-fldigi can be used to decode it. However, the Twitter feed indicates that a few days ago they were having RFI problems with the flight computer which was reseting whenever the HF transmitter was on, hopefully these have been resolved, see http://twitter.com/LVL1WhiteStar/

You can sign up for a launch notification announcement on the right-hand side of the home page at 
http://whitestarballoon.org/

Follow the flight live here
http://track.whitestarballoon.com/

HF Payload Details
http://wiki.whitestarballoon.com/doku.php?id=hardware:radio:hf:wb8elkwhitestarn17

Watch Tour of SpeedBall-1, ready to fly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgHVWCXM3hw

Picture of HF TX dipole with newly added dummy load
http://www.flickr.com/photos/48225359@N03/5551628243/

Speedball-1: http://whitestarballoon.com/

Free dl-fldigi software on the GitHub page of James Coxon M6JCX
https://github.com/jamescoxon/dl-fldigi/downloads

Also
http://ukhas.org.uk/projects:dl-fldigi

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