I don’t! A team from a university in London have built trackers which work in all TTN zones by changing according to the location determined by the GPS. But my skills don’t stretch that far. The best system for a Round the World balloon is almost certainly WSPR but it is not legal to use this airborne from the UK. I have applied for a special licence (Trials and Innovation) which would allow my to do this. I’m still waiting for a reply but they have said it will take a few weeks before I hear back from them.
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This is advanced engineering guessing in reverse.
We may not be able to control the height but we have many models available to use to predict an altitude & flight path and we specifically use GPS that can report altitude in flight mode so an appropriate decision matrix can be coded appropriately. And we know where we are and we know what time of day it is. So there are endless possibilities for changing parameters accordingly.
Floaters run way too high to be caught in a tree. But if/when the balloon degrades & loses lift or other atmospheric forces come in to play, then the aforementioned algorithms can cut in - have I moved more than a few metres in the last 10 minutes - no? and am I at less than 1,000m amsl - yes? - then I’m caught in a tree so I’ll send once a day.
I speak as someone who’s secondary tracker spent 36 hours at the top of a very tall conifer sending me a text message every 15 minutes until the batteries gave out.
Much much better to form guidance in a positive manner as there are no barriers to people using TTN however much anyone may protest.
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Hello,
I’m trying to follow it on ttnmapper, but the map is not showing.
https://ttnmapper.org/experiments/csv.php?experiment=Dartmoor+Escape&startdate=2021-08-27&enddate=2021-08-27&gateways=on&lines=on&points=on is OK
but
TTN Mapper
remains blocked on fetching data
Any idea to see the data on this nice site?
I’ve found ttnmapper a bit unreliable. This morning it was showing the map and the gateways which were seeing the balloon before the balloon itself was giving a gps fix which was reassuring. But as the number of gateways seeing it increased I think it becomes overloaded. It is a very useful tool although I was mostly looking at the CSV file output as that was more or less in real time.
To find it go to Advanced Maps and add the device ID of ttnwiv4n and then scroll down to where you can enter an experiment name - add Dartmoor Escape here and then try the CSV file button first to see if you can see anything. If you can try the Map button but expect it to show “Fetching Data” for a while if not indefinitely.