Rules

Radio

Uplink and Downlink have to be licence exempt.
- Steve (Rocketboy) and I have looked into the Amateur Licencing rules and have come to the conclusion that use of your licence and therefore you power allowance is debatable (see Section 11(2) for details). Now the details could be argued over till the end of time as the licence wasn't really written for this situation it doesn't really take account for it. We've therefore decided to qualify for the competition you can't use your Amateur licence and therefore the added power. However its not all terrible - licence exempt is all good and remember you are on the ground so there is more power available then you are used to, also different frequencies which might help with adding a bit of range. You will however have to comply with the licence exempt rules including the type of antenna used.

The downlink has to comply to licence exempt rules (|IR2030.pdf), and the returning message has to be received by 2 stations - if it can be listened by the distributed listener system all the better!

It is possible to use a yagi (or other antenna with gain) as long as the erp spec in |IR2030.pdf is not exceeded - so for example: 500mW e.r.p. is the maximum for 869.40- 869.65 MHz so you should be able to use a 100mW transmitter with an antenna with 7db (x5) gain (100mW + 7db = 500mW e.r.p).

On the day of the launch when you want to compete you need to get in contact with me once the balloon is in the air and I'll give you a random sentence out of a book that I want relayed via the balloon (just to stop you hardcoding it!). The sentence will be no longer then 20 characters long and will contain A-Z, a-z, 0-9, space and fullstop.

The payload as well as relaying needs to be tracked and comply to the 'standardised format' on the wiki (the sentence can be sent separately or tacked onto the end of your data string)

The sentence needs to be relayed at least once while the payload is over 20km altitude.

The message can't be sent by CW - any other 'more advanced' data formats are fine. The data also has to be recognised by the flight computer instead of just being a direct relay.

Payloads can't be launched without running it by me - this is just to make sure that the payload complies with rules so that we don't upset other band users (a picture will do).

Teams can consist of one or more people, the competition only starts if more then one team enters, the more teams the better in my opinion.

Teams contact me by 01/03/09 if they want to take part - the earlier the better Changed from 01/04/09

You don't have to be based in the UK to take part nor be a regular on #highaltitude or involved in UKHAS. However flights have to take place within the UK (so that the licence exempt rules apply!)

The winning team is the team that gets a complete sentence relayed from above 20km altitude with the furthest distance from the transmitting ground station to the payload (doesn't include the downlink) by the closing date.

Please feel free to use the wiki to document your plans, building progress - while it is a competition being friendly is also cool - I'm sure people will be interested in any progress!