[CRAPRS] Flew the payload!

[Jerry Pasker]

Tonight, I got out of the house, and did some real ...living..... the 
first in a long, long, while.

Tonight,  I got to fly my APRS payload from the sport hot air balloon 
Puff Proud Papa, flown by Dr. Joan Nickol. (it's blue, with a green 
dragon on the side)  She took off at the Monticello airport, landed 
in a pasture, and then gave tethered rides for an hour to everyone 
that wanted rides.  People love free balloon rides!  It was all 
tracked on APRS, and all relayed via my home digipeater. That means 
that my payload's antenna must be really bad if it can't get packets 
in to the digi down by Morse, Iowa, directly.   Remember, with little 
areas to land this time of year, and low winds, sport balloon flights 
can be quite short in total distance!

The battery pack tonight was 8 "AA" Duracell batteries.  They'll be 
replaced with lithium for the eventual solar powered flight but 
weight or temp was not an issue tonight, with the 80,000 cu. ft. 
sport balloon, and it's 20 million BTU/hr burner to give it lift. 
The temp, reported in Celsius, is skewed by the on board 7805 linear 
voltage regulator heating the circuit board of the APRS tracker.  The 
7805 is making battery voltage into 5 volts for the packet modem, and 
the GPS receiver.  About 80ma of total load. I suspect the GPS was 
drawing more during the first hour to charge its on board backup 
battery, since it was powered down for about 6 months prior to 
tonight. The old Icom HT gets power from the batteries directly. 
It'll take from 15 clear down to 6 volts.

I've found a switcher that's a three lead drop in 7805 replacement 
that will operate at 90% efficiency, and only draws 5ma of idle 
current, rather than 30% efficiency and 9ma idle like the 7805 
regulator, so the temp will read much more accurately.  And the 
batteries will last longer.  I also found a cheap solid state relay 
to turn the HT on 1 sec before each transmission (can control it via 
a power up signal from the APRS packet modem) that'll give me lots 
more battery time when I do the solar flight.

I'll need my hand to heal before I can solder in that replacement though.


Anyway, here it is:

http://aprs.fi/?call=KB0QCL-7&mt=m&z=11&timerange=604800

Choose "7 days" from the "show last" selector in the right side to 
see the data on the map.


-Jerry