Project Horus Beams Live DVB-S Video From a Raspberry Pi Zero W, LimeSDR Mini at the Edge of Space
Smart balloon payload also included a LoRaWAN radio connected to The Things Network, a control system, and telemetry and tracking.
Project Horus, an eleven-year-old effort by a group of radio amateurs to stream live video from a high-altitude balloon, has announced its success — thanks to a system driven by a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer and LimeSDR Mini software-defined radio.
High-altitude ballooning is a popular hobby, but one which typically restricts itself to transmitting location information and only capturing video or photography to local storage for later analysis. Project Horus, launched in 2010, aimed to change all that, turning a high-altitude balloon into an amateur television (ATV) transmitter for live video from the edge of space.
It's taken eleven years, and the development of several key pieces of hardware, but Project Horus is now a success. "Horus 55 was the culmination of something that had been discussed for many years within the Project Horus team — live video from a high-altitude balloon," writes the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group (AREG) of Adelaide, South Australia, in an article brought to our attention by Tech Times.
"The technical challenges in doing this are many, from designing a transmitter system that provides enough signal without melting in the thin atmosphere at high altitudes, to building a high performance receive system that can capture that signal, and then upload it to the internet for everyone to enjoy."
The Horus 55 launch carried a DVB-S amateur TV transmission system into the air, powered by a low-cost lightweight Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer linked to a LimeSDR Mini software-defined radio. An on-board power amplifier ensured that the signal could be received on the ground, while power was provided by eight lithium AA battery cells.
Horus 55 didn't only carry a live video transmitter, though: The same balloon was also host to an experimental LoRaWAN system linked to The Things Network, a flight management system to trigger a cut-away of the balloon to recover the payload, and a flight tracking system which allowed the team to discover its location and retrieve the hardware once it had landed.
"With the huge success of this flight, the team plans to follow this up with more video flights in the future," AREG writes. "There are many lessons to be learnt from this flight, and many improvements that can be made to both the payload, the ground-station, and the live-streaming systems. Viewers can look forward to higher quality video, more running commentary, and hopefully live video from the chase-cars as they recover the payloads."
The full write-up is now available on the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group website.