Pretty cool, although it's polluting so hopefully it wouldn't become too popular (probably not).
"And because such diminutive payloads don’t pose a danger to aircraft" even though they are small and wouldn't make a plane crash, I can imagine they would cause some damage if they ever enter a jet engine, although that would be unlucky as they would mostly fly higher than aircraft. I also wouldn't like it to fall on my head, but with the solar panels as depicted and the small weight I suppose it could somewhat glide.
> I’m a little puzzled about the balloons’ telemetry messages received on the WSPR network, as they have been few and far between.
But wouldn't there be a way to send messages to Starlink satellites instead of WSPR? Is it a problem of power consumption? (It would be great to be able to transmit images, not just GPS pings).
This is way cooler than I expected. I had no idea you could do near-space stuff for the price of a dinner, or that ham radio networks like WSPR could track something globally without satellites. Feels like one of those “old tech + clever hacks” projects that shouldn’t work but somehow does. Also kind of wild that a party balloon can end up halfway around the world.
I wish the regulations around HAB were not so lighter-than-air gas centric. Hot air balloons are much more accessible, especially solar heated hot air balllons. But they have much less lift per volume and so the FAA FAR 101 rules basically say they all have to be treated as the type where you inform the FAA beforehand and then every hour about their position among other things.
>any balloon that is moored to the surface of the earth or an object thereon and that has a diameter of more than 6 feet or a gas capacity of more than 115 cubic feet.
And the regulations on tethered balloons end up being even stricter than letting them go.
It is super cool - we managed to launch one on a pair of Aliexpress wedding baloons filled with helium and it tracked all the way from Europe to South Korea, for about a week.
It even breached the arctic circle and entered the jet stream for a bit (140+ km/h ground speed) :-)
I wonder what your liability would be in the event your balloon were to be struck by a commercial aircraft and cause injury to the flight crew or passengers?
In the summer you could theoretically station-keep a few of these over a city for a few hours at least with proper wind and lift gas planning. Could be enough to fly a stripped town T1000e or similar meshtastic relay during a natural disaster
I’ve been working on a hobby project to send a Raspberry Pi into the stratosphere (nothing really novel) but with all custom software. The entire process, hardware, and stack is documented on the GitHub [1]. Essentially all the software and major components are purchased. I’m just waiting for the spring and then start some tests with balloons, helium mixtures, and iron out any regulatory issues. If this interest you or you have any experience would love help or contributions. The launch will happen in Tennessee.
I saw you were looking for help sourcing things like balloons and gas. https://groups.io/g/GPSL/ worried be a great place to go and ask for help with that, if you haven't already.
Thank you, I'm glad you agree they are nice! The artist is James Provost, he's done most of the illustrations for Hands On since we switched over from photography a few years ago (I'm the IEEE Spectrum editor responsible for the column).
Isn't H2 better because better lift and being a molecule of two hydrogen atoms it is not quite as slippery as helium and quite easy to make?
From wikipedia "lifting gas"
"Helium is the second lightest gas (0.1786 g/L, 14% the density of air, at STP). For that reason, it is an attractive gas for lifting as well.
A major advantage is that this gas is noncombustible. But the use of helium has some disadvantages, too:
The diffusion issue shared with hydrogen (though, as helium's molecular radius, 138 pm, is smaller, it diffuses through more materials than hydrogen[4])."
The diffusion is the main advantage of using helium, it takes ~3x longer to leak out, which directly affects flight time.
Hydrogen is actually harder to buy in my experience, helium is sold everywhere for cheap in small canisters for parties, whereas the second requires like, industrial welding suppliers that will want to sell you a large tank for a few thousand or making your own electrolyser and compressor. There's no common use case for it you could piggyback on.
'Balloon Gas' for inflating party balloons is a mixture of Helium and Oxygen, at least in the UK, to stop Tweety Pie asphyxiating him/herself breathing the gas. So although it still is lighter than air, it's not as good as pure He.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] thread"And because such diminutive payloads don’t pose a danger to aircraft" even though they are small and wouldn't make a plane crash, I can imagine they would cause some damage if they ever enter a jet engine, although that would be unlucky as they would mostly fly higher than aircraft. I also wouldn't like it to fall on my head, but with the solar panels as depicted and the small weight I suppose it could somewhat glide.
and AFAIK are the goto supplier for HAB (High Altitude Ballooning) enthusiasts.
> I’m a little puzzled about the balloons’ telemetry messages received on the WSPR network, as they have been few and far between.
But wouldn't there be a way to send messages to Starlink satellites instead of WSPR? Is it a problem of power consumption? (It would be great to be able to transmit images, not just GPS pings).
Why?
- You can repurpose 2.4GHz Wifi gear opening many doors
- You can easily include volunteers dumping data from HF into a IP sink for telemetry. TTGO offers boards with 2.4GHz LoRa.
- Theoretically you still can add a "low rate" 868MHz/433MHz and a "high rate" 2.4GHz for transmitting pictures and other stuff more quickly.
- BOM friendly. As the balloon might get lost you have to plan a bit for costs.
https://arhab.org/
https://www.superlaunch.org/
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
>any balloon that is moored to the surface of the earth or an object thereon and that has a diameter of more than 6 feet or a gas capacity of more than 115 cubic feet.
And the regulations on tethered balloons end up being even stricter than letting them go.
It even breached the arctic circle and entered the jet stream for a bit (140+ km/h ground speed) :-)
https://komonews.com/news/local/weather-balloon-launched-in-...
As if we needed more junk in the ocean.
[1] https://github.com/stratopi-org/stratopi
I saw you were looking for help sourcing things like balloons and gas. https://groups.io/g/GPSL/ worried be a great place to go and ask for help with that, if you haven't already.
From wikipedia "lifting gas"
"Helium is the second lightest gas (0.1786 g/L, 14% the density of air, at STP). For that reason, it is an attractive gas for lifting as well.
A major advantage is that this gas is noncombustible. But the use of helium has some disadvantages, too:
Hydrogen is actually harder to buy in my experience, helium is sold everywhere for cheap in small canisters for parties, whereas the second requires like, industrial welding suppliers that will want to sell you a large tank for a few thousand or making your own electrolyser and compressor. There's no common use case for it you could piggyback on.