Events

February 8: Monthly Club Zoom Meeting: Amateur Radio Ballooning - VE7NFR

K7LWH

• 2 min read

Our club's next monthly club meeting will take place on Zoom only on Saturday, February 8, 2025, from 9-11am.

Join the Zoom Meeting

Zoom doors open at 9am. From 9 to 9:30am, join us in open conversation as we greet those who are arriving and catch up with each other. This a great time to ask for help on your radio projects and get to know your fellow community members before the official meeting begins. Come as you are; all are welcome!

The Official Meeting begins at 9:30am.

  • Our Announcements segment comes first. We'll start with brief reports on our club & net operations, the repeaters, and highlight upcoming events.
  • Show and Tell comes next.
  • Our Featured Presentation will follow. This month, we are excited to have the Steely-Eyed Balloon Men from the North Fraser Amateur Radio Club, VE7NFR, present on Amateur Radio Ballooning. Please see below for details.

Amateur Radio Ballooning with VE7NFR

Amateur radio ballooning requires an understanding of many things: materials science, wind/weather profiling, thermodynamics, weak signal propagation (WSPR), power management and chemistry. This presentation will discuss these as we look closer at two aspects of ballooning - (1) small pico-balloons that can float around 40,000 feet, circumnavigate the Earth and send their location and other data via WSPR; and (2) high-altitude-balloons that can go over 100,000 feet and provide wide area repeater coverage and other capabilities for several hours.
We will discuss what you need to do this, the regulations, the costs, etc. We will also play some live audio and video from our launches in 2024 and talk about our plans for 2025.

About Our Presenters:

Adrian Stimpson, VE7NZ, was first licensed in 1980 at the age of 15 and has been on the air almost daily ever since. He got his first job with an engineering company that wanted to hire someone with “Advanced Amateur Radio credentials.”

His ham radio interests include HF contesting (especially CW), deploying repeaters on unusual bands like 220, 900, and 1295 MHz and, of course, amateur radio ballooning.

He is a co-founder of The Canada Hub (www.thecanadahub.ca) a popular AllStar/IRLP/EchoLink network and a regular contributor the The Dipole (www.thedipole.com) - the most reliable source for Amateur Radio News.

Thanks to Amateur Radio, he has spent close to 40 years in the satellite and telecommunications industries, currently focusing on improving GPS performance by understanding how the ionosphere affects GPS signals.

Like Adrian, Scott Leaf, VA7SL has been playing with radio since the 1970s when he built his first transmitter with a RadioShack 150 in 1 kit, then modified it to wipe out the entire AM Broadcast band in his neighborhood.  From there things went downhill : Scott is currently the Repeaterbook.com Admin for British Columbia and the Yukon Territories; he is the Co-founder of the North Fraser Amateur Radio Club and the All Star Canada Hubs. He is the Net Manager and Co-founder of the Trans Canada Net. He is a delegated Canadian Amateur Radio Examiner.  Scott is the Editor in Chief of The Dipole.com, a satirical take on Amateur Radio and he is the Web Master of VE7NFR.com. Scott is also a dedicated High Altitude Balloon enthusiast and manipulator of fellow Hams to do things for him that he can't do, doesn't want to do, or can't afford to do by himself.

Before the meeting, make sure to check out the North Fraser Amateur Radio Club's Ballooning page: VE7NFR Pico-Balloons.

And if you have some time, check out some of their previous launches on YouTube: