Come out to the April 19 San Diego Luncheon for a presentation by Randy!

From Randy,KQ6RS:

“I compiled a five minute video of the seven weather balloons launched by seven new Technician license holders in the club. Since we currently have seven RTL-SDR receivers on Otay and Toro, we were able to simultaneously receive seven different frequencies (431.010 to 431.070 MHz in 10 kHz steps). Each student filled their ballon and launched their transmitter, a reprogrammed Vaisala RS41 radiosonde. Good thing there are a couple of crazy guys who go almost anywhere to collect used NOAA radiosondes to maintain an inventory of them.”

Mt Carmel High School’s amateur radio club is launching a series of weather balloons on Saturday Feb 15 at about 11:15am. There are seven balloons that will be launched at 15 minute intervals. Each will be launched by a recently licensed student.

From the club advisor:

Last March we launched six balloons at about 15 minute intervals from Mt Carmel HS. Each was launched by a newly licensed student. Each of the reprogrammed radiosondes sent their callsign and each student filled and launched their own balloons. Very hands-on. Well, on Saturday we plan to do that again except with a batch of seven newly licensed students.

The balloons will be tracked by our Toro and Otay receivers as well as many home receivers. This is possible thanks to the support the PAPA group gives us for installing receivers at the mountain sites – both for tracking the balloons we launch, and for gathering the replacement radiosondes the weather service launches. With close to zero cost for the electronics, we can afford to launch a lot of payloads.

There will be lots of pictures taken. I do plan to give a presentation at a PAPA meeting (or two) covering the balloon activities we do at the high school.

PAPA members (and anyone else) can track the balloons on this website:
https://amateur.sondehub.org/#!mt=Mapnik&mz=9&qm=1d&mc=32.86459,-116.20102

A hint to reduce clutter on the display – in the upper right click Settings (gear icon) and turn on “Hide welcome on start-up” and “Only show visible on sidebar” and click the gear to close the menu. You can zoom and pan the display. In the upper left of the area of the map you can set how far back in time to display balloons. The green dots represent receiver sites. They are at several at our houses. There are also receivers at the PAPA repeater sites on Toro Peak and Otay Mtn. The receivers are typically a Raspberry Pi computer with an RTL-SDR attached running special software and an antenna. Each of these receivers uploads received data to the amateur.sondehub.org website. The radiosondes are the Vaisala RS41 model. When launched by the Weather Service they transmit at 403 MHz. We reflash the processor with firmware that transmits in the 70cm band at 431 MHz.

Randy, KQ6RS

PAPA VEs help with testing for their club members and as you read above we have helped them to place receivers at two of our repeater sites.