UBSEDS2

This was the very first launch of the pico tracker. It was an overall success as the tracker functioned perfectly until the battery was fully discharged.

It was a joint launch with SUSF and CUSF from EMF Camp on 31st August 2014.

The Board

During the first revision board bring-up we found that the DFLL inside the Atmel SAM D20 was hilariously unsuitable for generating the HF clock. To be quite fair to Atmel it is made clear that the DFLL was not at all designed for this.

To work around this a 16MHz crystal was soldered - dead bug style - onto the radio’s crystal driver. This wasn’t ideal, but at least the clock jitter was vaguely reasonable!

The pico tracker before launch. A small piece of cardboard has been placed on the battery so that tracker can be kept de-activated.

Launch

With all three payloads active and attached to a 100g balloon, the flight was ready to go.

Phil Crump from SUSF about to release the balloon.

Map

Plots

Statistics

• Total distance traveled: 306.4km
• Great circle distance: 298.9km
• Maximum altitude: 23.7km
• Countries passed through:

The assent rate was much lower that planned: It averaged about 1.1ms^-1 for most of the flight.

Lessons learnt

• Batteries do not give their full capacity in flight. An attempt at power saving is required!
• Measuring temperature in flight is useful. We didn’t have time to add this before launch.

Listeners

Thank you to all listeners who tracked this flight!

Callsign	Telemetry Lines Received	Longest Path
G0WXI	633	309.2km
G8KNN	517	305.3km
G8FJG	499	165.7km
G6SUQ	366	121.4km
M0ZBU	330	87.2km
M0DNY/EMF	318
F1OIL	309	190.6km
G0TDJ	273	130.1km
G8IMN	238	225.9km
G0HDI	198	130.1km
G6GZH-M	186	86.5km
G8NWC	148	250.2km
F4FWT	134	164.8km
G8DHE	129	101.6km
PD3T	128	365.1km
F4FWT-1	50	181.8km
SWL014	39	261.9km
maxmed	30	37.0km
CALL	15
F5APQ	13	207.1km
JP404	11	17.3km
m6dnu	10
PE1CME	5	464.1km
G4YHE	1	21.8km
G8ZBJ	1	161.1km