Receiving SV1NJX balloon tracker tests

Today, after an announcement on his blog , SV1NJX activated briefly a balloon tracker on 433.708 kHz using CW and FSK (ASCII 7N1, 50 baud, 450 Hz) at about 08:45 UTC. 

The tracker signals were of good strength but with very poor stability, with pronounced chirp in CW and gradual frequency shift on FSK. I managed to decode a few packets using my Icom IC-7100 with DL-FLDIGI 3.21.5 and with an RTL-SDR receiver with SDR# and FLDIGI 4.1.06. AFC was absolutely necessary in order to keep decoding.

$$$$SV1NJX-1,34,08:45:11,38.079212,23.881712,01054,001,0.12,43.0,06,01*82AA
$$$$SV1NJX-1,35,08:45:28,38.079308,23.881735,01044,001,0.12,43.5,07,01*87B3
$$$$SV1NJX-1,36,08:45:44,38.079281,23.881693,01056,002,0.11,44.5,07,01*E6BE

$$$$SV1NJX-1,55,08:55:02,38.079262,23.881783,01052,000,0.32,37.0,07,01*71C6

$$$$SV1NJX-1,90,09:12:02,38.079319,23.881777,01057,000,0.31,36.5,06,01*9C68
$$$$SV1NJX-1,91,09:12:18,38.079288,23.881748,01050,001,0.31,37.5,07,01*F973
$$$$SV1NJX-1,92,09:12:18,38.079288,23.881748,01050,001,0.31,37.5,00,00*7A36

The actual balloon launch will take plane in mid-July 2021.

CNSP30 balloon over Greece

Plot of CNSP30 balloon from HABhub

Today we had a daytime pass of CNSP30 balloon over Greece. Most previous passes took place during nightime so we missed the change to plot it. In the morning it appeared that the balloon would follow a southest course and pass over Attica, unfortunately it turned East and was better received in Larissa and Thessaloniki. The balloon transmits APRS packets using callsign K6RPT-11, which are gated to the APRS.IS network and then plotted at the HABhub tracker site. 

During the pass I run an APRS receive only setup and I enabled my connection to the APRS internet servers network with a filter to pass only K6RPT packets. Some of the packets uploaded were from my station, either received directly or over an APRS digipeater.