Circled by a HAB whilst sleeping.

It seems that the balloon, B-30, came to play last night whilst I was asleep.  I started tracking B-30 earlier in the evening and the signal was getting stronger as it moved eastwards towards me when I fell asleep.  It was quite surprising that I could still hear B-30's signal when I woke up this morning, but nowhere near as much of a surprise as when I realised that B-30 had flown right around me then changed to a northerly course.

PICO HAB on HackRF with GQRX and dl-fldigi

I awoke this morning to find myself surrounded by low flying High Altitude Balloons. NANU and PICO were up.

I plugged in my HackRF and fired up two instances of dl-fldigi. The first used an analogue path from the AOR-8600mk2 reciever and the second took an audio feed from gqrx.  I found both signals in gqrx's waterfall  and managed to decode both signals at the same time.  NANU hit dirt before I got the digital path working, so I then tracked PICO with both receiver chains. I had to set the sampling rate for the HackRF to 10MS/s.  Initially I tried 8MS/s but dl-fldigi wouldn't decode anything - I noted that the RTTY scope hung quite often until I increased the sample rate.

The HackRF seems to be better than the USRP B100 for narrow bandwidth modes as it doesn't suffer from the discrete stepping TCXO that the USRP B100 manifests.

HABANERO

Today I've been receiving the HABANERO balloon from Holland, with my AOR-8600mk2 and a discone antenna in the loft.

Kingsley HAB

I've been seeing if I can decode the Kingsley HAB with the HackRF SDR and gqrx feeding fldigi-HAB.

The HackRF is connected to a AR-8600mk2 discone via a UHF bandpass filter and a preamp (at the wrong end of the coax).  Both the HackRF and AOR-8600mk2 share this feed by means of a 2-way combiner.

I'm not getting any good decodes yet with the HackRF, but the AOR is doing OK.

HABLAB/XABEN1

 More HABs launched today from Cambridge, UK. Receiving on 70cm ISM band.

 

ANU/NANU

It might sound like Mork calling Orson, but its another HAB.  This one launched from Cambridge, just to the west of me, so it is coming in nice and strong.

A while later I spotted NANU's signal. ANU is on the left, NANU is on the right.

NANU's not got much to say for itself:

High Altitude Balloon tracking

This might be a kind of live-blog. Perhaps. We'll see what happens.

Project info: http://ukhas.org.uk/

Tracking online: http://track.spacenear.us/

I'm using a discone in the loft and a preamp at the wrong end of the coax.  With this arrangement, I can here (but not well) some priates on UHF-SATCOM,  quite a few 70cm sat transponders and faint signals from L-Band SARSATS, so it works okish.

A screenshot of gqrx, using a USRP B100 & wbx daughterboard.

 One of dl-fldigi, using an AOR8600mk2 and a Signalink-USB.

Apparently that's PROM i can see.

Bob too now:

Now, I'm decoding Bob, but with bad checksums:

There's a bunch of loons going up, so I thought I'd monitor a whole MHz of spectrum in gqrx and look for them all at the same time, then tune in the strongest for decoding.  This is the playing field, below.  Bob is where the receiver is tuned to, and PROM is up at 434.167, faintly visible.

I popped up to listen to FO-29 and when i came back, there was another signal:

Apparently, it was TRUSS:

A little while later, I spotted ROLL in the waterfall:

 

But the decodes weren't so good as it was in a noisier part of the band:

I continued to monitor, alternating between TRUSS and ROLL depending on which seemed stronger at the time.  I didn't get many good decodes.