As part of the RSGB’s National Coding Week activities this year, the RSGB Outreach Team has been working closely with Hi-Impact to launch a hot air balloon equipped with a LoRa digipeater. We’re delighted that the RSGB Legacy Funds and Moonraker have sponsored the event and that Moonraker has provided some great prizes.
Your mission will be to build your own LoRa tracker for National Coding Week, or as your own goal, with the instructions the RSGB has supplied.
If your tracker build is successful, it will beam up packets to the airborne relay, which will transmit them to a local Igate.
PLEASE READ THE USER MANUAL CREATED SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS EVENT, BEFORE ASKING ANY TECHNICAL QUESTIONS THANK YOU!
Please click on the below link to find out more, and access the build manual:
Please feel free to share this post in as many places and groups as possible - it would be great to get as many licenced amateurs engaged as possible, including clubs
Good luck to all the SOTA community who decide to take part - and remember to become an RSGB member to win the prize!
@MM0EFI Fraser will have more support for you soon - stay tuned to this post!
Interesting project. I have more LoRa trackers that I can shake a stick at but I may reconfigure one to take part.
Reading the RSGB documentation, written by none other than our very own M0JKS of this parish it becomes apparent that there is actually no coding involved in this National Coding Week project!
It looks interesting… but I have some dumb questions.
Will the balloon’s height and location be injected into the normal APRS traffic so we know where to point antennas?
Is the winner whoever gets a APRS beacon repeated by the balloon that is furthest away based on their lat&long and the balloon’s lat & long?
Under UK Amateur Radio rules, 70cms does not have an “airborne” note in the frequencies schedule, and the licence says “Unless airborne power limits are stipulated for the frequency band, the use of Radio Equipment is not permitted airborne.”
Will the downlink from the balloon be running on 70cms under ISM rules with a non-amateur callsign, or will the downlink be on a band for which airborne use is permitted under Amateur rules?
I asked Ben this same question myself yesterday and he pointed out that the answers are all in that PDF User Guide (specifically Section 3).
But he conceded that it’s not “hot-air”, but a high-altitude gas balloon.
" On top of that, if you get your signal the furthest from the balloon launch location, you could win a prize!"
That’s easy, I take my tracker to somewhere out in ZL (UK antipodes) and turn it on and then I must be one of the people whose “signal is furthest away from the balloon launch location”.
There’s an odd behaviour I see from some of the LoRa trackers/iGates that my iGate hears where the latitude is some number a way beyond 90. Left to its own devices, the distance calculation then gets a mite creative. I think this probably happens when no actual GPS position is available. Having spotted the pattern I now block such “fixes” …
I think the project idea is very good… it will show people that installing such software and using it to take existing source, configure and build it and then update real-world hardware they can use is not terribly difficult. It should give people confidence to try things which has to be good and may be enough spark for them to want to learn more whether they are young or old.
Classic GIGO. Latitude is bounded [-90…0…+90] so anything outside is NaN.
In this case I figure it’s a value that’s not been set explicitly yet, and therefore contains whatever the build system left behind. It’s just consistent enough not to be purely random. Makes a change from everything starting somewhere very specific in the ocean just south of Nigeria…
I would have thought there would have been a good bit of enthusiasm on here for this, given many of us benefit from LoRa, and it is likely to result in more I-gates going on the air.
Instead, we have people taking it apart and looking for faults. Does anyone really believe that the RSGB, Ben and Dave would set up an event that doesn’t follow the rules?
This is a SOTA forum and I always thought it was a bit different from other ones, but recently it’s proven me wrong.
Go climb a hill and write an activation report. I don’t see too many of those…
Not looking for faults, but trying to figure out the details. That often means getting past enthusiastic PR to the real detail behind. Sometimes that search for detail does uncover something missing. SOTA also has it’s fair share of pitfalls, and if you want to avoid them you need to know where they are, and then perhaps you can help new folk from falling into them, too. SOTA’s had twenty-something years to refine it’s rules and yet still, occasionally, complications arise. That it does so well has quite a bit to do with the quality and thoroughness of the nit-picking that’s been applied to it over the years. I’d be worried about this LoRa event if this group didn’t apply that nit-picking skill to it.
This looks like a fascinating project, as someone that has only recently started to carry a APRS tracker, it is an area that I am keen to learn more about.
I know Dave and Ben have put a lot of work into this so I will be lugging a LTE/4G iGate onto Shinning Tor (G/SP-004) There will be a few others on different mountains for the event. For the duration of the flight, the HAB Digipeater will use the special call sign GB1HAB and appear as a balloon symbol on online APRS sites. Check out https://aprs.fi/ where you will be able to check on its progress.
RTFM. It’s a male thing, don’t I know! In this case, Dave @M0JKS has done an outstanding job of writing an idiots guide, as well as explaining how APRS works, and also an overview of AFSK v CSS (chirp spread spectrum). Anyone who doesn’t read the manual, before chipping in with “you can’t do that”, is doing Dave a disservice.
THANK YOU!
I have an awkward question…
Thanks.
