I have heard back from the CAA that the preliminary approval will be issued tomorrow, which is fantastic news! The proper permission should be issued closer to our launch window in April (every weekend, in the hope that one will be good to launch in).

In the meantime I have been working on a SMD tracker board that, if finished in time, will fly as backup on the same flight. The objective of the tracker is to make a board for domlins pico flights as cheap as possible. Hence the payload name $$CHEAPO.

NSE1’s flight code has been adjusted to enable flight mode as soon as it gets a GPS fix. This is because the uBlox chip seems to get a fix much faster if left in default mode. Once the fix has been acquired it sends the command to switch to airborne flight mode.

NSE1 outputs telemetry strings on 434.650(ish)MHz at 50 baud, 7 bit ascii, 2 stop bits and 350Hz carrier shift. The format is as follows:

$$NSE,message_ID,time,lng,lat,altitude,satelites,battery,flight_mode,temp_internal*99A6