DP0GVN still spotting WB6RER Pico Balloon 01-06-2025

That's not true! Everyone knows the Earth is flat! HI HI 73 de KS4HE

 

I changed the start date to 2022, totally amazing!
KZ4TN

 

Its turtles all the way down. Sorry for the delay, I had to don my tinfoil hat and underwear. 73 and CUL OM

 

Ouch!

 

Does anybody know the predicted flight path going forward? How does one go about "talking to" or "seeing" this balloon with ham radio? I have 2 meter and 10 meter to work with here in Taxachusetts.
Thank you.

 

Well, study a lot and study some more, you will get the General license.
I am only General class operator and have been many years.
Personally, I do not see any advantage of upgrading to Extra. I fund a lot of Extra operators within the General portion of the bands we are lucky to have.
Good luck and I hope to meet you on the bands.
CW is the preferred mode, but I have a microphone connected in case I should come across an urgent
call on SSB or AM which I do enjoy from time to time... Keep up the good work and being an elmer for new hams...
Very 73 from Rhode Island...
Myrt.

 

The balloon is transmitting on 20m using WSPR. I am not sure anyone can really "predict" the flight path of the balloon as it catches jet stream winds and goes where ever they go. It would akin to tossing a leaf in the ocean and predicting where it would be in a week.

As for "talking" to it, you can't transmit to the balloon but you can receive position reports. Anyone, not just amateur radio operators, can receive the balloon's position if you are in range with the correct setup.

Setup your HF receiver with a 20m antenna and WSJT-X. Set the WSJT-X mode to WSPR and select 20m. You should start receiving spots and if you happen to be close enough to the balloon to receive a spot, it will show up on the list. If you click the "upload spots" option in WSJT-X, you will be able to see a nice map of stations you received on websites like WSPR.rocks. If you don't have privileges to transmit in the 20m digital portion of the band, make sure you don't select "enable TX."

Joshua

 

Well, I'm sure the jet streams follow somewhat of a pattern. Where is that pattern pointing currently?

 

Come on, this isn't chaos theory! Well, the movement of the balloon kind of follows some line of chaos theory.

One step at a time....
-HF receiver. What do you have? SDR? Transceiver? Maybe you can assemble a radio kit from QRP-Labs for digital modes like a QDX or QMX if you don't have an HF radio yet.
-20m antenna. You are interested in building antennas, you say. Build a 20m antenna.
-WSJT-X is likely the most used piece of amateur radio software. Very easy to figure this one out. Probably a bazillion references online to setting up and using the software.
-WSPR is the "mode" used in WSJT-X. Probably only 500,000 references to this online.

 

Kenwood TS-440S

That will be coming soon.

I've heard of it, but have no idea of how to connect the radio to the computer. Maybe that is not possible on this transceiver. I understand the computer side of it, but not the radio side.

Again, any help you can provide in how I can connect the 440S to a Windows 10 PC would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Well, getting the computer to run the radio frequency can be quite difficult do to rare parts to get an RS-232 serial port running on a 440 Sugar

But the good news is you don't need the computer running the frequency if your are able to tune the needed frequency yourself as many do with out the need for CAT control . [Computer Aided Tuning]

What you need is a AUDIO interface with VOX Push To Talk [PTT] to hook a sound card to your radios MIC jack or accessory port.

https://tigertronics.com/index.htm [Signal Link Web Page]

So you buy a Signal Link which has it's own Sound Card that plugs into USB port of your computer, and use jumpers and the cable to connect to it via the 8 pin mic jack or the ACCY 13 pin plug in the back? Look and see if you have a ACCY jack in the back of your radio

Here are the Signal Link Part numbers for a 440x one set for the ACCY connector, the other for using the 8 Pin MIC plug



Here is a Used Signal Link with the 440 cable for the 13pin ACCY plug at HRO for $69
https://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=M1-002140

 

It's 'their' (2x) and I'm missing some punctuation. Makes it a bit difficult to read quickly....

 

Correction: It is transmitting on 20 meters in the WSPR segment using the WSPR protocol, but the signal is too weak for anyone further away to hear. The tracker antenna (a full size 20m dipole) apparently developed a problem early in the flight. I believe the lower half of the dipole broke off. So the signal has been very weak since then and few spots since that happened. You can click on the little blue bubble on the map on the Traquito tracking site and then click on the WIND link and it will take you to Windy.com and show you the wind currents at that altitude. But this works properly only if full telemetry is received by the spotting station and lately all we are getting is a partial transmission of the data so there is no altitude, voltage, temp coming through, just a grid square location. The amazing thing is that it is still up there. And we only know that because of DP0GVN spotting it.

I just realized that I made a big mistake in the title of this post as a 10m transmitter, it is a 20m WSPR tracker transmitter. All of our flights now are on 10 meters simply because of the smaller size dipole antenna.

 

12 MegaWatts? Amazing for such a small package!

 

I would really like to try this. Do you all have a build video or anything like that?