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First Flight - March 8, 2020

A project log for LORA GPS Beacon for high altitude ballooning

A light weight, low power LORA GPS Beacon for high altitude ballooning and other tracking duties.

martinMartin 03/09/2020 at 16:421 Comment

We flew a 3,000 gram balloon filled with almost 200 cubic feet of hydrogen.  The plan was to reach 126,000 feet but we only made it to 119,323 feet.

The balloon flew a primary VHF APRS beacon with a twinlead dipole antenna.  The payload landed on the VHF antenna and couldn't be heard.  The LORA beacon continued operating and lead us to the payload.

I recorded the LORA beacon with my home base station and received most all of the packets until the end.   I also copied from my car with a mag mount.  All communications stayed above -90 RSSI and the system is supposed to operate down to -120.  The beacon antenna was just a 6.5" piece of wire.


Discussions

morgan wrote 03/11/2020 at 19:51 point

Nice work! I had hoped to join you but conflicted with the LUNAR launch and the students I work with were submitting TARC qualifiers. Hopefully I can make on in the future, would love to collab on some LoRa payload tracking.

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