brainwagon

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged that a group of students were planning to photograph the final launch of the shuttle Discovery from a high altitude balloon. What’s remarkable is that they succeeded. Click the link and surf on over to find what a couple of Android phones can do at 100K feet.

Interesting. A group of students are launching a high altitude balloon “some miles” from the launch site of the Shuttle Discovery at Cape Kennedy, and will be streaming the video of the event as recorded by a pair of Android phones on board. I suspect that any video so streamed will be less than stellar, […]

The Southgate Amateur Radio News is reporting that ARRISSAT-1 will not be deployed during an EVA from the ISS this week as previously planned. It now appears that it will remain on board until July. No Wednesday deployment of ARISSat-1 | Southgate Amateur Radio News. 3. AMSAT learned on Friday morning, 11 FEB 11 that […]

I want one. I tried to get one, but the last batch sold out in 1 minute, which made me about 3 minutes too late. AMSAT-UK FUNcube SDR video | Southgate Amateur Radio News. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFZGlqKPPQo They are currently in short supply, as they are being built by hand. Here’s hoping they introduce some extra capacity […]

I tweeted this earlier, but in case you aren’t subscribed to my twitter feed (user brainwagon) then you should check it out: some Google engineers sent one of their mascots to over 100K feet altitude along with several Android phones to record the experience. The video is awesome. Android In Spaaaace! – Official Google Mobile […]

Every once in a while, I feel like making high quality pictures of ground tracks of satellites. The Generic Mapping Toolkit is handy, especially when combined with the pyephem library. The thick line is the ground track of the amateur satellite AO-51, at any point in its next pass where it is visible from my […]

Well, it’s been quite some time since I tried to work any of the FM birds, but I dusted off my TH-D7A, my voice recorder and my Arrow antenna, and decided to give it a go. It was pretty busy, and as usual I found it a bit difficult to get in. I got myself […]

It appears that the solar sail cubesat NanoSail-D that was recently launched may not have deployed properly: they haven’t been able to track it or contact as of yet. Bummer. I’ve been intrigued by solar sail technology for quite some time. Here’s hoping they figure out what went wrong, but bummer thusfar. NanoSail-D Mission Status […]

Lost in yesterday’s thrilling launch of the SpaceX Falcon-9/Dragon launch was that during their flight, they also apparently deployed a cubesat: CAERUS (which is apparently Greek for “opportunity”). It has a 900mw FM AFSK beacon downlink on 437.600, and operates under the amateur callsign KJ6FIX. I have not as yet been able to locate TLEs […]

The legendary Phil Karn, KA9Q is apparently the brains behind the digital telemetry modem that will be used aboard the ARISSat-1, a satellite designed to be tossed off the ISS sometime next year. From his paper: ARISSat-1 will carry a new telemetry modulation and coding scheme, BPSK1000, designed to handle the severe fading often encountered […]

Apparently NASA is sponsoring the development of nanosatellite launch capabilities by sponsoring a two million dollar prize purse for the first team to launch a standard 1U Cubesat into orbit (payloads must complete at least one orbit) twice in a week. NASA – Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge. I found out about this by reading the Team […]

Luke Gesissbuhler did a balloon launch, lofting an HD video camera and an Apple iPhone to lofty heights before recovering them. Very nice. The footage right after burst was kind of cool: I was wondering whether the fragments of the balloon or parachute tangled with the camera: perhaps dangling the camera on a longer tether […]

I was on the #hamradio channel on IRC this morning where people were watghing the progress of the Iowa High Altitude Ballon (IHAB) operating with callsign W0OTM-4. We saw it drift up to an altitude of about 88K feet, before descending. They had a 20m beacon, an APRS beacon running on 2m, and a cellular […]

Cambridge University has an amazing webpage that provides a web based front end to a weather balloon flight prediction program. It can even save output in Google Earth’s KML format. Very cool, very useful, saved for future perusal. CUSF Landing Predictor 2.0.

Ralf Vandebergh has a really interesting web page, where he shows pictures of the ISS and Shuttle missions taken with a 10″ Newtonian telescope. The detail is really amazing. Images of ISS, Space Shuttle and other spaceflight objects by Ralf Vandebergh George Tarsoudis has similar equipment, and produces similarly impressive results: Images of Satellites by […]