[aprssig] APRS for a near-Arctic hot-air balloon flight

[Ryan Butler]

On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 18:30 -0600, Mark Conner wrote:



> Or, perhaps there is a polar-orbiting AFSK digipeater roughly
> equivalent to PCSAT-2’s capabilities that I'm not aware of.  Fairbanks
> is at about 65 deg N, which I think is too far north for the ISS.  I
> haven't been keeping up with the latest on the available satellites.
> If PCSAT-1 were expected to live into January that would have been OK.
> While using satellites would give less-frequent updates, the advantage
> of using VHF or UHF instead of HF might be worth it.
> 
Well, kinda.  AO-16's digipeater bit is enabled I think, it's got a
fairly strong downlink.  Problem is, it's 1200 baud PSK downlink, and
1200 baud MFSK uplink.  You might be able to modify the opentracker
firmware to transmit MFSK and MixW as well as many other programs will
decode the PSK and act like a TNC to pop it into an APRS program?

Could be the perfect use of a still functional "old bird".  I can try to
have an IGATE on if that's the direction that goes.  Finding an MFSK
soundcard based program isn't hard, finding a hardware based solution is
more difficult, I think the PSK-1 from Paccomm will do it, and as I
said, it may be fairly trivial to do MFSK with the opentracker?

Just something to consider

Ryan, KB0JQO


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