WB0SMX

  ANSR-122 Dine College Flight 2019 Filed in ANSR on Mar.31, 2019 Photos and Data The ANSR (Arizona Near Space Research) team drove up to the Navajo Reservation to conduct a flight last week. In our previous post, we detailed some changes in the ground station operations and some of the challenges we faced. This post will show some of the pictures from our video that was live streamed during the flight.   Dine College Campus from ANSR-12  Most of the team arrived in Chinle Arizona, near the Canyon de Chelly National Park on Sunday afternoon/evening. On Monday morning, we went over to the Dine College campus, where we met with the faculty sponsor for the Space Grant Program, along with a few of the students. The students were putting the finishing touches on their payloads which would fly on Tuesday morning. A few ANSR members stayed in the lab to help students with details of preparing their payloads for flight. Other members went outside to assemble the gro

  ANSR-122 Dine College Flight 2019 Filed in ANSR on Mar.28, 2019 Ground Station Operations For the past 6 years, Arizona Near Space Research has been traveling up to the 4-corners area on the Navajo Reservation, to conduct a high altitude balloon launch. These operations are to support the Arizona Space Grant program, which encourages students to construct payloads which are used to make scientific investigations at the very edge of our atmosphere. This year, in addition to flying the students payloads on our flight, we also flew a high definition video streaming payload designed and built by Eugene Swiech WB9COY. Gene had shipped his package to us just a day or two ahead of the trip up to Chinle, Az. So we didn’t have much time to play with it before the flight. The instructions for the payload indicated that the groundstation would use a separate router for the video link. When we hooked it up this way, we had problems in that the laptop that is used t

  ANSRTrack - Deploy to Linux: Part 3 Filed in ANSR Tracker on Mar.11, 2019 Distribution via AppImage To this point, we have identified all of the libraries to be distributed with the executable file in order to distribute a folder containing everything necessary to run on most reasonably up to date versions of linux. We also discovered the folder arrangement necessary to make this work. We put everything together in a package that allowed us to copy the program to a computer which does not have Qt installed on it, and were successful in running in the new environment. Next, we will try to use a distribution method called an AppImage to distribute the program. An AppImage is a container (kind of like a compressed folder) that contains many of the same files as our “manual” folder transfer method that we got working. The advantage of the AppImage is that the user can just copy this one file anywhere on their linux machine and expect it to work with minimal ch

  ANSRTrack – Deploy to Linux: Part 2 Filed in ANSR Tracker on Mar.08, 2019 Distribution via Folder Copy In my last post , I described how I went about identifying all of the files necessary to distribute my new High Altitude Balloon Tracking program to linux machines other than the one it had been developed on. At the end of that post, I was left with a folder which contained an executable file, several library files and a subfolder containing another library file. In this post, I will go over the structure of these folders and how I tested the distribution on alternate linux operating systems and machines. Basically, I started with the second distribution method mentioned in the Qt Wiki article . The first method was to statically build the application, which results in a huge executable, and looked to be more work than I was interested in doing at this point. The second distribution method is to collect the executable and supporting files all under

  ANSRTrack – Deploy to Linux: Part 1 Filed in ANSR Tracker on Mar.07, 2019 Identifying Critical Libraries As mentioned in our previous post, I have been developing a new version of our High Altitude Balloon Tracking System. This is being written on the Qt platform, a GUI-based development environment using C++ and its associated libraries. I will not be discussing the use of the Qt platform up to the point of compiling and running the code in the development mode. Once the code compiles without errors and is reasonably debugged, it is time to deploy the program to be used on computers other than that which it was developed on. In order to deploy the program, we need an executable file (from our compile effort), and a group of library binary files that the program uses, but which are not likely to be already installed on base linux operating systems. This post outlines my method of identifying those files. I am nowhere near an expert on this, but I will tr

  WB0WHO -SK Filed in Operating on Mar.03, 2019 I received news on Wednesday, February 27 2019 that one of my oldest and closest friends, John Koppert WB0WHO had passed away.  He had not been heard from since the prior Monday, Jan 25th.  When his son-in-law went to check on him, he was found lifeless sitting in his chair.  A heart attack is suspected. I met John when he moved to my hometown of Bennington, Nebraska in 1971 or 1972.  We were both in Jr. High School at the time.  I didn’t take much notice until I saw that he was able to run the old 16mm projector system that the school used to show films in the classroom.  I found that fascinating, and began talking with him about it. It turned out that we shared many common interests.  Chief among them was an interest in electronics.  We both liked to tear apart/work on/repair?? old radios and televisions. I recall one year working with John to tear the voice coil out of an old speaker.  We hooked this up to a cassette