MONTY HAB

Getting a good strong signal from MONTY this morning.

And CHEAPO too.

SOFA Activation

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.