Paul Verhage (KD4STH) visits EOSS

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On Thursday, July 5th, 2001 Paul Verhage took time out of his vacation odyssey to stop in Denver and visit with members of Edge of Space Sciences.

Paul and Mike Manes (W5VSI)

Paul has a great presentation prepared to show off his activities with various groups. As you can see in the picture below, he brought along several of his payload packages. With these he was able to demonstrate construction techniques and show off his modular approach to building payloads.

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Notice the square holes in the sides of the payloads? Paul builds his experiments onto square platforms which he inserts into these holes. The actual experiment resides outside of the enclosure. However, shared systems like power supplies remain within the enclosure.

The payloads are wrapped in rip-stop kite building material and eight attachment points are established at the corners of the top and bottom of the module.

In the photo above the payloads are not connected. However, if this was a flight configuration, Paul would connect these modules together using four short nylon runs (18 inches or so). The top payload is attached to the spreader ring below the parachute by four support lines. Above the parachute support is provided by a single line. To further reduce spin this line is interrupted by a spinner joint just above the parachute.

The advantage of this type of support system is that it greatly reduces the spin rate of the payload train. We were (at least I was) amazed by the relatively slow spin of his videos. He estimates the average spin rate of this system at around 1 revolution per minute. So, it's not a perfectly stable system, but it does reduce rapid spinning motions and give a much better platform from which to capture video.

I didn't get pictures of the many external modules Paul had on hand, but it was quite impressive. There was a very nice 35mm camera enclosure with a pointing system controlled by servos and numerous stand off antenna booms and experiment tie downs were available for viewing.

Paul doesn't communicate with his payloads much after they are launched. His methodology is to program the payload controller to take care of all the house keeping chores. So, once it's launched the ground crew merely monitors the packet radio for data downloads and APRS information to aid the tracking and recovery effort.

I was quite impressed by this method of operation. EOSS has always had a command link to the balloon to trigger various events. It's a bit more sophisticated but I can see a great benefit to Paul's approach. He never has to call on the payload to take pictures. He just enters a series of actions into the program controlling the flight. His controller might query the gps to determine altitude, see that it had reached a threshold of (arbitrarily) 60K feet then, rotate the 35mm camera to point to the horizon, take a picture then rotate the camera to look down, then take a picture. Much better way to control photography than having a simple timing routine or a manually operated camera triggered by an uplink command.

 Below a sampling of those in attendance.

Eoss wishes to thank Paul for taking time out from his trip to talk with our group. It was a fun, enjoyable and educational evening and all in attendance were pleased with the dinner and the company.