UBSEDS8 was our second launch with a 36” Qualatex Balloon. After breifly appearing to enter a float at 9.3km, this flight continued to slowly ascend, eventually reaching 11.2km. This is possibly a record for the highest flight with a Qualatex balloon.

Pre-stretching

This envelope was pre-stretched slightly more than UBSEDS6, eventually reaching an internal pressure of 4.9kPa as measured on the Omron M2.

Tracker

This flight enabled APRS tracking outside of countires that disallow airbourne APRS operation. However no packets were heard, possibly due to the output power being too low. More investiagion required.

The output voltage swing from the TCXO on this board seemed particularly low, and it would not drive the MCU input. The TCXO is normally used by the MCU for symbol timing and to measure the TCXO drift against GPS, but for this flight the MCU used its internal oscillator. The frequency of the internal oscillator is only specified to ±2.5% and this error in the symbol timing prevented Contestia from decoding except at high SNRs. RTTY appeared to be unaffected.

The tracker failed about 4 hours into the flight. This didn’t appear to be related to low temperatures.

Map

Data

Statistics

Total distance traveled: 404.2km
Great circle distance: 401.7km
Maximum altitude: 11.2km
Countries passed through:

Resources

Listeners

Thank you to all listeners who tracked this flight!

Callsign	Telemetry Lines Received	Longest Path
G8DHE	331	241.7km
G6GZH	201	384.5km
F5APQ	187	263.1km
0x17	184	290.1km
G8FJG_v	167	285.4km
G1DYQ	157	234.1km
G8IMN	148	304.6km
G8KNN	143	355.7km
ON5LT	108	261.9km
M1ARI	69	88.8km
ASTRA	68	273.8km
M0SBU	65	102.7km
G8ZBJ	23	267.8km
ULC_websdr	21	120.1km
DutchMillbt	19	349.8km
G8FJG_V	15	282.7km
swl	14	85.0km
G0WXI	12	278.6km
G8FJG_H	5	125.2km
chimpusmaximus	2	205.7km