Project Horus High altitude balloon project

26Sep/100

Update future launches

The blog has been a bit quiet since the launch of Horus 6 and Horus 7 - however, we've been busy making plans for future launches & working on new ideas!

Grant VK5GR was good enough to put together a great montage of the stills from the Horus 7 onboard camera - thanks! :D

Adrian's repeater parrot repeater payload proved immensely successful on the launch of Horus 6, though as a parrot repeater it was inherently difficult to control with a large number of users. We've decided that as it was an excellent communications platform for our chase cars & launch team, it will be making a reappearance - hopefully as a standard item on our future flights. It's being slightly reworked to make it a little easier to use (to prevent talking over one another), and will have some new features - DTMF decoding (uplink) is planned, with a serial link from the repeater to our main flight computer for control.

With the parrot repeater being used for team communications, we're planning to fly a cross band talk through repeater for the amateur radio community to use at some stage - most likely input on 2m and output on 70cm - those familiar with working with satellites should feel right at home!


We've currently got a few launches in the pipeline, the next of which is planned for 10/10/10 to coincide with the One Day On Earth movement. Grant VK5GR is the driver behind this, he will be producing a segment from the footage/stills we capture to submit to One Day On Earth.

The carputer has also had a bit of a re-factoring after proving itself very useful - I've built a better battery isolator (the diode block I was using wasn't ideal), and have converted it to run on an efficient DC-DC power supply too. Will try to pop some pics of everything up soon... :)

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