Overview The Skunkworks team at the Gloucester County Amateur Radio Club is always looking for new projects to dig into, learn from, and build something new. So when we found that the “Greencube” satellite had been launched and was a very different type of device we started figuring out how we could work it. The […]
by Jon Pearce, WB2MNF & Mike Thompson , KG4JYA The Clubhouse was closed for general use today but Doug, Mike and I got there before 8 to set up another radio-carrying balloon test. Our objective this time was to use a sealed balloon (as opposed to the vented balloon in the last test) and to […]
Would you like to ride in our beautiful balloon?
Meteor scatter communications is a rare and fascinating mode of ham radio. It uses radio signals that reflect off tiny rocks that enter the atmosphere at high speeds during meteor showers. These showers happen several times a year with the largest in August and December. To use this mode, you need to prepare well, have […]
Overview The W2MMD satellite station at the Gloucester County Amateur Radio Club’s clubhouse is pretty close to state of the art. We have the top-of-the-line M2 satellite antennas, an SDR Play receiver for copying the downlinks, PST Rotator software for rotator control and Doppler correction and an aging Yaesu 847 transceiver used only for transmitting. […]
“Success” for the GCARC Field Day satellite station has always had somewhat of a low bar – if we made the one contact needed for the 100 bonus points we declared success and quit, finding that getting any additional satellite contacts weren’t worth the effort. Normally satellite bands are pretty open with only about a […]
Field Day is always an important event for the GCARC Skunkworks team. A single satellite QSO is worth 100 bonus points – more points than some single-band stations get throughout the entire contest – and everyone in the club knows whether we’ve succeeded or failed at getting that QSO. And the satellite station needs to […]
In an earlier blog post we described the process of implementing our first version of the GOES16 receiver. That system worked well for about a year until we decided to install a new tower at the GCARC clubhouse that was dedicated to Skunkworks projects. That meant taking down the GOES system and reinstalling it on […]
Radio location services are used in many places including those monitored at the GCARC clubhouse. Currently we have an APRS station that monitors amateur radio APRS traffic as well as beaconing the current weather recorded by the clubhouse weather station. We also have an ADS-B aircraft monitoring station that receives broadcasts on 1090 megahertz from […]
The Skunkworks projects at the GCARC clubhouse encompass about a dozen Raspberry Pi computers along with several Linux virtual machines running on the Skunkworks server. Monitoring all of these systems is a considerable task, so we developed a simple reporting structure that allowed multiple systems to be monitored easily on a Grafana dashboard backed up […]
