[McHUG] Checkpoint for Timonium

[Rich Mitchell]

Pete,

The shield thing would be just for an indoor presentation of shields and Arduinos.  But I'm guessing we will also have presentations on PICetSats and the PICetSat launch from our hamfest.  Toward the end of the time we will be heading outside to launch a PICetSat Lite - similar to our hamfest BUT with a pressure sensor so we get an accurate idea of its altitude.  The plan I think (Pat is the planner) is to track it with Arrow antennas and ham radio gear, like last time.  I think Pat will also be running the HT or whatever receiver output into a laptop for automatic decoding.

If Pat is available Sunday, that might be a time to know exactly how all this is coming down.  

By the way, if I get my Arduino receiver shield working right I may just take it outside and hook it up to an Arrow Antenna.  Those little transmitters weren't supposed to have much range beyond 500 feet either.  If it does work I'll have to add some EEPROM to the shield to record the events.

Rich
--
McHUG - Physical Computing ;) 
MicroController Ham User Group

-------------- Original message from "Peter Morton" <mortonph at comcast.net>: -------------- 


> Rich- 
> 
> It looks like you've bitten off a lot to chew over the next 17 days. I 
> suspect you will experience a number of sleepless nights. 
> 
> The first thing I am wondering about is what is the goal for the Hamfest? 
> Just to transmit across the room and demo the shields? Or, do you want to 
> launch a balloon, too? 
> 
> The SparkFun receiver is good to only 500 feet or so. If you use antennas 
> with an additional 12 dB of gain, you've only increased the range by a 
> factor of 4 or to 2000 feet. I'm not sure, with the limited reading I've 
> done, that these receiver-transmitter combinations will work over the ranges 
> anticipated for a balloon-launch application. 
> 
> I haven't done any programming in the past 14 to 15 months or so. And, at 
> my age, I forget things faster than I learn. But, I'd be glad to try to get 
> the ol' brain working again. Let me know. 
> 
> For a balloon launch, I would suggest using my FT897 (can operate using a 
> car battery or the UPS battery I bought from Chuck) in AM mode and passing 
> the audio to a PC for recording, and decode simultaneously using your 
> Arduio system. You can play back later from the PC if you have any missing 
> data. 
> 
> One of these days, I'm going to build a board with a GPS module on it. 
> 
> -Pete, W3GVX 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Rich Mitchell" 
> To: "MicroController Ham User Group - Physical Computing for HamRadio" 
> 
> Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 11:11 AM 
> Subject: Re: [McHUG] Checkpoint for Timonium 
> 
> [snip] 
> 
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