Recap of EOSS-79

These screen captures come is roughly the order in which I open them up when starting an in-flight analysis,

Above is the main or home window of Balloon Track for windows. It is showing the prediction for EOSS-79. In the upper right hand corner is the database file. The window with the green background is the prediction.

After I have a prediction set up, I open up the packet terminal screen. You can see (in simulation) the capture of data from W5VSI-11. The actual log file from the flight is being replayed here.

The buttons highlighted in green indicate open windows or file captures in progress.

The screen above shows the progress of the flight and its current (or last) packet of data. The graph is currently showing the ascent rate, however clicking on any of the buttons below the graph will bring up that data.

Above is the tracking screen. On this screen is the prediction shown in green (ascent phase) and red (descent). The blue line is the actual track of the balloon so far. Double clicking on the "pin" marked W5VSI-11 opens that balloon which show much of the currently known position data about the balloon.

The screen above is the data as recorded during the flight. By using the scroll bar to the right of the screen it is possible to scroll down to the earliest records of the flight. The current record is always on top, older records descend down the screen.

This screen is actually kind of new. I wrote it for EOSS-77/78. You will note that on the Map you get a terrific idea of how the track of the actual flight compares with the prediction. However, there is no way to indicate on the predicted track where the balloon should currently be, so you don't really know how accurate the prediction is with reference to the actual flight. Above, you can see direct comparisons between the prediction and the actual flight. These comparisons are based on altitude. This screen helps me to understand just how closely the prediction and the actual flight are matched.

Sometimes it is necessary to know where the balloon is in relation to a specific fixed location. The screen above serves this function. Clicking on the down arrows in the location boxes opens up a list of all known locations. that would be all launch sites, all VORs, many significant road intersections used in the calculation of grid coordinates. And you can also manually enter in a latitude and longitude. The program then generates bearings, ranges and elevations from those locations to the balloon.

Every once in a while we have a GPS problem. If we are flying the W5VSI-11 APRS system, it transmits the NMEA string $GPGSA which is an overview of the GPS solution currently being used by the on board GPS receiver. This may or may not be helpful in understanding what is causing a problem.

I created this screen (above) to show all the packet stations heard by my home station. The program not only keeps track of the stations heard, it counts various types of APRS packets it hears. The idea here was to have a quick way to discover if any one station was causing problems and should cease operations during a flight. In the above example, all stations EXCEPT W5VSI-11 were actually heard on 144.390 MHz post flight. They just seeped into this display as a function of the buffer that holds data in the KPC3/Comm port interface. They were not interfering with the flight of EOSS-79.

And last, this screen was written a few flights ago when we were flying the W5VSI-11 APRS system but had a GPS failure. The KPC3 also has several other sensors in it that are formatted and sent to the ground. The "Source Packet" line in the screen shot shows the raw data and the break out of that data is also shown. The data of primary interest is the altitude. Should a GPS failure occur in the future I'll be able to know the approximate altitude during the flight.

That's it for the roundup of all the stuff I monitor on my main computer during a flight.

maintained by Rick von Glahn