Abstract

Long duration high altitude balloon missions will often travel beyond the range of a ground station's line-of-sight VHF/UHF communications range. This is particularly problematic when flying in remote areas or over the ocean. One solution is to fly a satellite modem but these can be quite costly particularly for missions that may have no chance of recovery. Described in this paper is a low-cost low-power HF telemetry transmitter that can relay a balloon's position along with system telemetry over thousands of miles. A modified open-source decoding program is used to decode the data, check for error-free reception and then post the report directly to a server. Each valid report is automatically displayed on a Google Map-enabled website with features dedicated to high altitude ballooning. Anyone with an HF radio and computer connected to the Internet can then act as a remote reception site to enable a large world-wide distributed network of ground stations.

How to Cite:

Brown, B., (2011) “Multi-Mode Transmitter for High-Altitude Balloon Telemetry”, Academic High Altitude Conference 2011(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/ahac.5607