Project Horus High altitude balloon project

Were Still Here!

Yes, we're still here, launching balloons!

All Project Horus launches are now occurring as part of the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group (AREG).

For more information on our recent launches, visit the AREG Project Horus page, available here.

73

Mark VK5QI

Project Horus In Hibernation

As you can tell, we haven't done anything balloon related for a while!

With team members becoming increasingly busy with work, family life, and other amateur radio activities (mostly with the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group), we sadly haven't had much time for high-altitude ballooning.

All the equipment is still working and stored away, so we still have the capability and experience to do a launch at a few weeks notice. If you are interested in doing a launch out of Adelaide, please contact us, there are many members who have a wealth of experience in high-altitude balloon launches who can advise or assist with launching and tracking.

Thanks,

Mark Jessop (VK5QI)

LaunchBox Launch, and upcoming PicoHorus launch

The LaunchBox launches went well, with both balloons launched and recovered. Some details available here, more to follow...

We still have about 1.5m^3 of helium left over from the launch, which we plan on using to launch a pico floater balloon early in the morning on Saturday the 15th of November. This launch will be flying a PicoHorus payload, transmitting 50 baud RTTY on 434.650MHz.

The flight path has it heading from Adelaide towards Victoria, arriving near Melbourne sometime late Saturday afternoon. If the payload floats as intended, it should then head back towards South Australia.

LaunchBox Launch, Take 2

EDIT: Launch moved from Saturday to Sunday due to weather conditions.

The second attempt at the LaunchBox launch will be happening on Sunday the 9th of November, subject to weather conditions.

If it all goes ahead, the two balloons will be lifting off sometime between 10am and 11am on the day,В carrying experimentsВ from schools around the state.

The currentВ lineup of telemetry payloads is as follows:

Launch #1 (approx. 10AM)

Main Telemetry: 434.450MHz, 50bd RTTY,В "VK5ARG-1"

UniSAВ Experimental payload: 439.200MHz, GFSK (not decodable without custom hardware)

Launch #2 (approx.В 11AM)

Main Telemetry: 434.500MHz, 50bd RTTY, "VK5ARG-2"

More to come...

Were still here!

UPDATE: The Launchbox launch has been delayed until early November due to weather and landing area concerns.

The last year has been a quiet one for Project Horus. Getting the team together for a launch has been difficult, as we've all been busy with other commitments. However, things have still been ticking along behind the scenes...

In June we worked with UniSA Connect to run a balloon launch workshop with students from regional South Australia. At the main launch in Burra we had about 30 students in attendance. You can find a short writeup of the launch here.

More recently we've been working with LaunchBox, to launch a number of experiments for schools around the state. Last weekend (13th of September), we launched a Pico payload as a systems test, and also to give the LaunchBox crew an idea of how Project Horus runs a launch.
The main LaunchBox launch will be happening this coming weekend (20th of September), assuming the weather predictions are suitable. Two balloons will be launched, with expected burst altitudes around 30-35km. More details will be provided shortly.

We're still working on writing up many of our previous launches. As we've effectively lost count of how many launches we've done, all future launches will just be referred to with a date (i.e. Horus 2014-09-20) to avoid confusion.

73s
Mark Jessop VK5QI

The scourge of spam

Like all blogs, projecthorus.org sees its share of spam. For the most part, this is kept in check by comment filters like Akismet - the last couple of months have been a bit of an exception though:

Spammers attack!

Ouch!