Dave Akerman

It’s that time of year again where a young man or woman’s fancies turn to … launching a big lump of latex skyward, and I start to get emails asking for advice, which you get get by reading my article “High Altitude Ballooning, From The Ground Up (and back again)”.

Sometimes it’s handy to have a repeater to extend the range of a radio transmission. The particular usage I have in mind is to be able to receive telemetry from a landed payload that is too far away (or hidden by buildings or geography) to receive directly, but could possibly […]

This post has been replaced by a permanent page so please see that.

My next flight (depending on wind predictions) will be to try to relay a chat session between 2 remote locations (one in Northern Ireland the other in England) via 2 balloons one launched at each location, with all communications via LoRa transceivers, something that is impossible without relaying because of […]

It can sometimes be tricky to find a payload even if you know the co-ordinates – if it’s landed in dense vegetation or high in a tree for example, and of course there are some rare circumstances where you won’t know the exact co-ordinates. For these reasons I’ve added software […]

For this flight I joined forces with Steve Randall – one of the earliest HAB hobbyists in the UK, and the most prolific launcher; between us we’ve flown well over 200 weather balloons. But experience doesn’t mean that things always go to plan, as we shall see … Balloon The […]

Chasing balloons is often the best part of the entire process, but can be challenging if you don’t have the right kit, or it isn’t accessible.  It’s particularly difficult if, as with many of my flights, you’re chasing alone; a laptop isn’t much use when you’re driving! My previous car […]

Although the current Pi In The Sky boards include an FM transmitter for use with RTTY, there are some reasons for wanting to transmit RTTY through a LoRa module: You can use 1 aerial for RTTY and LoRa, instead of 2, which makes payload design a lot easier Extra RTTY […]

This is an update of a previous post, but post-flight (so I know that it works!) and with instructions on how to make your own tracker, and your own gateway to upload to the live HAB map. Introduction GSM-based trackers are quite rightly frowned upon for HAB tracking, mainly because […]

GSM-based trackers are quite rightly frowned upon for HAB tracking, mainly because they only work at low altitudes (within range of a mobile phone tower, which aim the signal generally downwards).  So they don’t provide tracking throughout a flight, which is a problem as then you don’t know where the […]