{"id":305,"date":"2013-06-20T21:25:48","date_gmt":"2013-06-20T20:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/?p=305"},"modified":"2013-06-30T20:43:06","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T19:43:06","slug":"cheapo3-flight-14062013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/?p=305","title":{"rendered":"Cheapo3 flight – 14\/06\/2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I launched a test flight of the new cheapo boards to test how they performed against the old ones. Sadly the results were disappointing with a very weak RF output.<\/p>\n

We aimed for a low ascent rate (1.2m\/s, which we came very close to!) and released it out to sea.
\nAfter the balloon had traveled a couple of miles I noticed the signal was much weaker than anticipated, after eventually losing the signal altogether after about 25 miles.
\nLuckilly G8KNN (Cambridge), jijdaar(NL) and a few others jumped in to save the day, and managed to track the thing all the way up, and most of the way down (to about 5km).<\/p>\n

Sadly the payload did not make it into Europe, however I am glad to have had the chance to test the new boards before relying on them for a much more expensive flight.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: On the 30th June 2013 I had a phone call from a woman on the island of Borkum (Germany) who said she had found the (badly damaged) payload in the sea!<\/p>\n

I would have loved to have seen some photos of the payload, but unfortunately she did no have access to the internet. After spending about 15 days in the north sea I expect the tracker would have been damaged beyond repair, so I said not to worry about sending it back.<\/p>\n

You can see in the (badly edited) image below quite how far the payload drifted from its tracked landing location.<\/p>\n

\"cheapo3recovered\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I believe the problem was down to the antenna being made from cheap single core telephone cable (which I thought would be extremely similar to cat5, which works well). I will launch another board in the next few weeks with either a cat5 or a coax antenna and see if there is an improvement. In hope to be able to source a small step up regulator board to allow future flights to run from just one lithium AA cell<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I launched a test flight of the new cheapo boards to test how they performed against the old ones. Sadly the results were disappointing with a very weak RF output. We aimed for a low ascent rate (1.2m\/s, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cheapo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris-stubbs.co.uk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}