Tracking cu spaceflight payloads

Tracking CU Spaceflight Payloads

The progress of our flights can be tracked through the UKHAS distributed balloon tracking system.

A more comprehensive guide to tracking can be found on the UKHAS wiki here.

The distributed listener map can be seen here: Spacenear Tracker

Helping out

We are always looking for radio amateurs to help us track our balloon payloads.

Depending on the launch, our payloads transmit RTTY or DominoEX digital modes on 434.650MHz or 434.075MHz LSB.

You can decode the telemetry with any software that can do those digital modes, however it would be most useful to us if you could use the UKHAS modified version of FLDIGI called DL-FLDIGI which can be found at http://www.github.com/jamescoxon/dl-fldigi/ which automatically submits recieved telemetry to the UKHAS distributed tracking system (a bit like APRS). DL-FLDIGI runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and instructions for use can be found on the UKHAS wiki.

Telemetry string format

We use the UKHAS standard for telemetry strings

$$callsign,ticks,gps time,latitude,longitude,altitude,other data

Where ticks are in seconds since the payload was turned on and other data is a series of other semi-colon delimited fields specific to the current flight.

e.g. $$Badger,4528,12:23:06,52.2135,0.0964,28320,2;0;1