April302016 Meeting Notes

Attending

Present: Rick, Cord, Dean, Jeffrey, Weston

• Payload conversation, we are agreed to 6lb max. Tradeoff in $$ for helium/balloon.
• Rough plan to set 6lb payload max, then shave ounces wherever we can near the end to minimize weight (as trade for max altitude)
• Cord has friend Andrew Wilson who will attend in two weeks, he has extensive ham experience.
• Dean described the bat tracking system he was using. 48 hour life on battery-powered radio beacons they'd glue to them. (recovery discussion)
• Weston got the 900mhz serial pipe. RFD 900+ by RFDesign
• GPS L70 is chip, according to specs it has 'balloon mode'. We may need to find out if we have to toggle this somehow.
  Notes: 60k GPS notes: http://showcase.netins.net/web/wallio/GPSrcvrsvs60kft.htm
• Cord's Re Phone GSM chipset is programmable (per Weston).
  Weston requested Cord research the capabilities of the Duino.
• Dean suggested we do a Foxhunt to practice recovery techniques.
  Weston suggested cutting 900mhz if the final land-recovery is the main focus and we are only using a single method.
  Cord will focus on GPS functionality in Re Phone.
• Standalone beacon possibility: http://rcbeacon.com/blog/?product=fox-hunt-beacon-transmitter
  Ben ordered one for help with terminal recovery.
• Dean asked if we could make the June Mini-Maker Faire date.
  Possibly?
• Weston described how he reverse-engineered a headset for the Bao Feng handheld to make a connector to the Pi so it can interface with APRS. Excellent.
• Dean asked about timeline for testing recovery with what we have already, Weston says maybe 2 weeks.
• Ben suggest: we have a display table at Mini Maker Faire with either results or a display of the hardware.
  Cord: We should mail Nick at Science Factory
• We'll try a range test in two weeks then possibly perform an ad-hoc recovery test and/or try out having a fixed base while someone drives around with the transmitter setup. Cord will try to get GPS online, if it's not available then we'll just test signal reception w/ canned data.
• Weston would like us to commit to range test.

Weight notes

RFD 900+	18g
Handheld Baofeng	127g
Raspberry Pi	157g (w/ cable)
Re Phone	22g
Spot Tracker	179g
4000mah battery	121
Sphere	311g w/ guts
Working total:	935g

-- Main.BenH - 30 Apr 2016