This was the topic of the August 31st Beginner's Academy Zoom. Note: AI was used in the production of this video. I did not have a balloon, but only the radiosonde. This is prep for tracking HAB flights or even amateur rockets.
Greg N4KGL demonstrates how to track amateur weather balloons using a $30 Quansheng UV-K6 handheld radio. With a repurposed Vaisala RS41 radiosonde provided by Bill Brown WB8ELK, the project uses ham-built IJV V4 firmware and a NA6D AIOC interface cable to pipe the radio's audio into a browser-based decoder called webhorus. After an initial firmware misfire with F4HWN, the IJV V4 firmware successfully decoded the RS41's Horus Binary telemetry and displayed the balloon's position on a map in real time — all for about $95 in hardware. The presentation also covers portable decoding with an Android tablet, CW Morse code experiments, advanced CW firmware mods by NR7Y, and channel management using the IJV memory editor and CHIRP. The takeaway: ham-written firmware transforms cheap radios into genuinely capable tools, and the same approach could work for tracking rockets at Samson launches.
