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) :-)
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])."I'm currently thinkering of building a balloon with a 2.4GHz LoRa transmitter (SX128x) and a low-power STM32U microcontroller.
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.
If you're interested in high altitude ballooning, there's an active community around it.
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.
Very cool! Brings this to mind: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/17/object-us-mi...
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?
https://komonews.com/news/local/weather-balloon-launched-in-...
QRPLabs sell even lighter trackers https://www.qrp-labs.com/u4b.html
and AFAIK are the goto supplier for HAB (High Altitude Ballooning) enthusiasts.
I always like their illustrations that "minimalist?" two-three color orange
This sounds so cool!
> 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).
Tracking site: https://amateur.sondehub.org
> "My first pico balloon made it only halfway across the Atlantic before going silent."
As if we needed more junk in the ocean.
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 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.
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.
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
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.