Gary Dewey

On June 29th., 2019, four members of Triple Cities Makerspace launched, tracked, and recovered a high-altitude balloon.

The balloon used was a 600-gram weather balloon filled with around 100 cubic feet of helium.

The payload consisted of: an HD video camera, an APRS radio transmitter to transmit GPS and altitude data, and a Slow Scan TV transmitter.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to participate in something called a “fox hunt” – or a hidden transmitter hunt – with the Binghamton Amateur Radio Association (BARA). This activity brings together a group of people to find a radio transmitter which has been hidden and is broadcasting on a specific frequency; they are tasked with finding the transmitter based on radio signal strength, which is usually accomplished by using a directional antenna, such as a yagi antenna. The term…

I’ve recently acquired my amateur radio license (technical level) and joined the Binghamton Amateur Radio Association (BARA). BARA is based out of the Kopernik Observatory and Science Center, and among their fairly extensive collection of equipment is a 2 Meter Band Yaesu radio connected to a computer with a Terminal Node Controller (TNC), which performs digital repeating for their instance of APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System). I worked on a project to migrate their current setup to a Ras…

To celebrate Cosmonautics Day on April 12th, the International Space Station began transmitting slow scan tv images related to the Interkosmos project from April 11th-14th, using a Kenwood TM-D710 transceiver located in the Russian ISS Service module which broadcasted on the frequency 145.800 MHz. I found out about this event from an amateur satellite radio organization called amsat; and with my new interest in radio image reception, I planned to attempt to make contact with the ISS and decode…

I’ve always been a space geek, interested in astronomy and cosmic travel.  Recently I’ve become obsessed with a new space-related hobby – downloading images of the Earth as signals from weather satellites! I call this hobby “selfies from space” because the images are created in real-time; if the images’ resolution were greater and you had the ability to zoom in sufficiently, then you could see me standing outside with my antenna capturing the images.

I first became interested in this hobby…