Iridium Integration Challenges As mentioned in our previous posts, we are beginning to develop more sophisticated payloads. One of the features that we are adding is two-way global communications with Iridium. As payloads become more complex a number of issues pop up. First, the total labor required to design, program, and test the payloads. But […] Continue reading
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Our Introduction to Iridium
Mission: Global, Two-Way Comms While APRS has served as the primary tracking system on our previous missions, the idea of having two-way communications capability in all geographic areas is appealing. We have investigated satellite communications for our future missions. Starting out, we considered several services, including: OrbComm Globalstar Iridium After talking with fellow balloonists and […] Continue reading
Uploading Frames to APRS with Python
An upcoming project will be using a redundant communication system that is co-located with an APRS beacon (but won’t communicate in the ham band). In case of APRS beacon failure, we would like to upload position packets from this redundant … Continue reading
Completed California Near-Space Project Site
I’ve recently gotten involved with the California Near Space Project, a non-profit organization started by Ron Meadows and several other individuals. They are most well known-for their highly successful trans-continental and trans-Atlantic flights with latex balloons. Here’s a video of … Continue reading
Formless, Yet Functional
I am really just getting started on my one web site here. I am not 100% sure about the content I will post, or what it will look like. I figured it was probably better to start with something non-ideal … Continue reading