The Sky-Eye II Amateur
Television
Payload
By John Rehwinkel KG4L
| On Saturday, September 15, 2001, John Rehwinkel, KG4L, demonstrated his ATV payload at the monthly meeting of the Loudoun Amateur Radio Group in Leesburg, Virginia. This is a full-motion color capability with full GPS Lat-Long, altitude, and direction, plus transmitter identification. In a message to the L_A_R_G Reflector, John describes his system; this information is used here with photographs I took that morning. This was a very cool demonstration. Several LARG members also demonstrated their receiving capabilities. I hope to add photographs of received signals soon. Thanks John for a great effort. Regards, Norm Styer - AI2C |
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Camera The camera itself was an
X10 Xcam, which is no longer sold. I had got it in trade for an Anaconda
camera, which I bought for $39.98 from the folks at www.x10.com:
http://www.x10.com/products/x10_sc18a.htm
The Anaconda model will work just as well as the Xcam, the difference
being that it has a 60 foot cord. This is a color camera with sound, which
runs on 12VDC. As it happens, the price I paid for the Anacondas was an introductory price, the current price (a week later) is $49.99. |
| GPS Receiver
I obtained the
GPS receiver (yellow unit in upper right) from Tom WB3AKD, but they're
commercially available as refurbished units from the original manufacturer
for $50 apiece. It's tricky to find on their website (I expect they'd rather
you buy their new gear), but the information is here: http://www.delorme.com/user/gpstripmate.asp |
_P9140002_V2.jpg) |
Caption Card The GPS captioner (which also puts the club callsign into the video stream) is made by Intuitive Circuits: http://www.icircuits.com/osd-gps.htm However, I obtained it from the folks at P.C. Electronics reachable at www.hamtv.com. They don't have individual pages for their products, but you can download their catalog (or individual pages) in PDF format from their website. The GPS captioner (with ID) is their part number OSD-GPS (catalog page 7), $119. |
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Video Transmitter
The video
transmitter is a Videolynx (also obtained from WB3AKD), and is also available
from P.C. Electronics. It is their part number 434 (catalog page 5),
$99. Another possibility for a transmitter is this one: http://www.northcountryradio.com/atv12mk2.htm It can produce up to 2 watts, and operate on different ATV frequencies by changing crystals (which would allow me to use my 434MHz mini-beacon for telemetry). |
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Antennas
The antenna
is a UHF J-pole made using the instructions in this (excellent, but long)
web page describing how they work:
http://free.prohosting.com/~w0rcy/Jpole/jpole.html
I condensed all this into a C program that computes the lengths
for you:
http://www.vitriol.com/ftp/jpole.c I had intended (and still intend) to make a crossed-moxon turnstyle, as described in a recent issue of QST. An earlier article on ballooning (January 1999 QST) mentioned a mini-wheel by Olde Antenna Labs as good for ATV use. There's a picture of one of these mounted on a glider at: http://members.aol.com/hgjohn1/atv/
Other Stuff
The remaining
parts were from my junkbox.
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