On Saturday October 20, 2007, the ARBONET-2 balloon carried a 10 meter
beacon built by Richardson Wireless Klub members to 89,000 feet above
Northeast Texas. The CW signals were heard in Oklahoma,
Arkansas and as far south as Houston. The 500
milliwatt transmitter was built from a Universal QRP Transmitter
kit purchased from Dan's Small Parts. Power for the
transmitter was 3 Lithium batteries in series producing 9.9Volts. http://www.danssmallpartsandkits.net/
Morse code keying of the transmitter was done by a Byonics PicCon
microcontroller based radio controller designed for hidden transmitter
hunting . It was provided by Mark Culross KD5RXT. The controller
is completely field programmable via DTMF tones. It utilizes
EEPROM for all programmed options so they are remembered when power is
removed, and is quite compact.
http://www.byonics.com/piccon/
The balloon carried other payloads - a digital camera, VHF/UHF
crossband repeater, APRS, and a VHF homing and data beacon.
For a detailed report of the launch and recovery, go to:
http://www.arbonet.net/blog/
and http://arbonet.net/gpage12.html
