Dave's BalloonSat Project

After participating in about a dozen balloon launches and recoveries over the past several years I finally decided to build my own capsule with APRS tracker and camera. The capsule box is a styrofoam shipping box typically used to deliver medications to your home of residence. I've had several different sized boxes delivered, and have converted two of them to capsule project boxes.

APRS Tracker: The primary tracker is a BibRedBee 2M tracker (http://www.bigredbee.com). It's a combo 2m transmitter on 144.39 at 3 watts, TNC, and Lassen IQ GPS all built onto one card. Power is supplied by a 7.4v 1200mah Li-Poly battery. Antenna is a 2m 19" whip.

Camera Recorder: A bullet camera video output feeds the Innovative Circuits (http://icircuits.com) On Screen Display GPS (OSD-GPS+) with Carrier Board, which also has a Garmin GPS35-HSV low voltage GPS input, with output video and superimposed GPS data to the recorder and stores about 2 1/2 hours of video onto a 4GB SD card for later viewing.