Ahh, the box of goodies!!! Without that crucial part of the flight, then we would be doomed for a science disaster. With something of such high importance, it wouldn't make sense if we didn't show you it, so here we go! yeah... Also for something with high importance, its really boring. We used the same box as last time. If you don't remember, then let me just give you a refresher on it. We cut out foam into a box and we used gorilla glue, which surprisingly worked very well! We also made a lid (not shown ): ). the setup is not all shown, HEY! Who took this photo! Well, we have two layers separated by a cardboard plate with holes in it. The bottom layer is the tech, and the top layer has the hand warmers, so that's why there are holes in the divider. BTW the credit for the cardboard plate goes to me (Ezra). i guess that's it :P
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So pretty much all we need for this APRS before we can say its fully complete, is the amazing design of an antenna. The stubby antenna we had was not that powerful and was just kind of sad.. Not exactly what we need. We thought about what we should use and we searched on the web for a antenna that was easy to make, light, strong, low power, long ranged, and more importantly: Cheap. As you may already know, Antennas really are not that simple. however, this type is actually just 2 pieces of wire, each the length of exactly 17 and a half inches long, one pointing up, and the other pointing down. At one end of each of the wires is a looped. here's the instructions: http://www.qsl.net/ylradio/dipole.html also, because of the bad description, i drew in Microsoft Paint what it looks like. :D The two wires that are near each other cant really touch because they would cancel each other out so they had coaxial cable which is just a wire, in a tube, next to a wire, in a cable/tube.
Also, just in, we got a better picture of the antenna so you actually know what i'm talking about: We recently have been working on the APRS radio a lot and not been posting on this blog for a while, so forgive us for the lack of posting. We had plenty of issues to this radio, and a few were actually very obvious while others were not. First one was a miss wiring error done by me, Malachi, which is very unexpected since i have an IQ of about 1. We fixed this, but another error appeared, consisting of one problem: the radio was not showing any sign of it transmitting. We found out a strange little issue that was causing all this. It was that the cord, carrying all the data, PTT commands, and other stuff, was not fully put all the way in to the stupid radio. If you don't know what im talking about, here's a picture of the cord: We had a simple fix for this. shave the edge around the thingy to let it go in further. The third problem we had, was once we had soldered all of this together in a smaller, compressed, more space efficient, permanent board. here's what it looked like in its final state: The problem was a cold solder. its where you don't heat the solder enough for it to stick. there were plenty more minor challenges, but they are not really worth mentioning because i'm too lazy to mention the other 300 things. heres some photos of the process of soldering and a prototype thingy i drew to show what we were doing: Another problem we had, was actually not our fault in anyway. We always went to the same radio station to test this but it never picked us up. After getting frustrated again and again, we finally looked at when he last got a response. it was a year old. he didn't have it turned on. We went to a different aprs i-gate and it picked us up and showed us on the map. it even tracked us as we went through the neighborhood! :D we can now officially say we have a fully functional APRS balloon tracking system. That's the most perfect little circle we drove in.
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AuthorMalachi and Ezra's page where we build cool stuff and either break it, set fire to it, etc. in the name of science. Archives
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