Balloonolo-7

Balloonolo-7

Launch date Sept 4, 2016
Location: Vila Marim, Vila Real - Portugal

Major improvements on this launch:

• Transmition will be on RTTY and LORA, both at 434MHz, using RFM98W
• There will be a temperature and pressure sensor inside the balloon, close to the neck, that will measure these across the entire flight
• Inisde the payload another temperature and pressure sensor, plus an humidity sensor will record these conditions during the flight.
• Batery voltage will be measured and recorded
• There will be a ballast valve that is set to release 100ml of alcoohol (water will freeze at those heights) at around 20.000 meters. I want to know how the balloon will behave with the release of ballast.
• There will be a helium valve set to release helium during 60 seconds, at 30.000mts. I want to know how the ballooon will behave with the controlled loss of lift
• Using a W25Q32BVS 32M-bit serial flash memory to log all the information of the flight.
• All controlled from a Arduino Pro Mini running at 3.3V, 8MHz
• LORA gateway in the chase care collecting the telemetry coming from the Payload and uploading it through a ESP8266 Wi-Fi modem to the HABHUB site.
• Chase car position will be uploaded as well
• Improved the SNR of the received signal, both on RTTY as well as LORA

Ballast and Helium valves:

Well, this was definitely not a sucess launch. I forgot my LORA GATEWAY at home so I had to drive 3h back and forth to pick it up. I should have called off the launch and re-scheduled for some other day. Another lesson...

Well, after that drive I was already tired and plus, we were running against the clock (we were going to send the balloon after 2pm, plus ascent, then falling... well, you know... we will eventually be looking for the balloon at night). I decided to go ahead with the launch and then, another mistake... I filled the balloon with not enough helium. The result was that the ascent rate was to slow. We were able to track for a couple of hours but we were seeing it moving east, towards Spain, but the altitude was increasing very very slowly.

Anyway, the balloon never reached an altitude higher than 6.000m and went slowly towards Spain. We tried to follow it but realized that it was worthless. At around 19:00 the balloon started to descent, also slowly, maybe because the latex was leting some helium out. It never blew up, so it kept on drifting east.

At almost 20:00 after loosing contact we decided to give up.

It should be somewhere in Spain, around the Zamora area.

Update Feb/2018.

After 1 year and half we never retrieved back this payload. I wonder where it is and if it was found or not.

Maybe one day I get the call.

Balloonolo-5

What a success!
We were able to send, track and recover this high altitude balloon. Again, we decided to join forces together with team Jebedias and shared the same balloon to carry two independent payloads.
Great day, late August, amongst friends and family.

New improvements:

- First time I was using LORA @ 433 MHz and RTTY @ 433 MHz. Impressive the performance of LORA
- Decided to build a LORA gateway, that comes with us on the car, receives the LORA messages and tracks the path of the car.

Some conclusions drawn from this launch:
The radio on the top payload totally jammed the GPS on the bottom payload. So, we were never able to retrieve a valid GPS sync from the bottom payload. The GPS on the bottom payload did work perfectly. Maybe because the two payloads were too close, I don't know. I guess I'm not going to try it.
During preparation we noticed that the second GPS wasn't working but we decided to attempt the launch anyway.

The Balloon was launched at 11:30 in the morning, reached the maximum altitude of  30.995m at 15:33 and then started his descent hiting an olive tree at 17:39.
The trajectory changed a few times but we were able to track it using LORA and RTTY (harder, coz we had to get out of the car and set the YAGI antenna) all the time.

This time I also had a GPS on my chase car and I uploaded to HABHUB the location of it.

The following image shows the trajectory of the balloon (yellow) and the trajectory of my chase car (red). As you can see, the ballon started to go east, but suddenly geared towards west. After a while we went back east.

This is where it ended, on top of an olive tree.