I can sense the "what are you talking about?" questions in the air.
Three years ago in February, after the headline Chinese Balloon Incident, I started looking into the responses, starting from the question, "Did The USAF Shoot Down a Ham Radio Balloon?" and first encountered the idea of hobbyists that made small or downright tiny balloons that they'd let ascend into the atmosphere and transmit a low power signal with some information that could be monitored wherever they happened to be. It eventually turned into a fairly long introduction to the topic of hobby balloons that go around the world.
Again, that was over three years ago, and groups like the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade are still online, and growing.
Earlier in the week, I came across an article on one of the forums I read where a guy, working on his own, had found a way to get a very lightweight balloon into the upper atmosphere - above most airline traffic - and it made me want to do a post about what he did. Maybe to encourage you, or maybe to encourage me. Let me show a map he posted showing the travels of his cheap little balloon.
What I really want to show about this is the information in the upper left hand corner. I'll enlarge it, and add it here.
While the big picture shows what appears to be around 3 laps, this says 3.821 laps - and much more impressive to me: 68 days and 8 hours floating around the world. Just above the bottom of the summary, it says the last altitude was 13.70 km - which converts to just under 45,000 feet: 44,948.
Now here's the embarrassing part. I dutifully saved this image but I apparently didn't leave myself a link to the source where he shows off the heart of the balloon, a folded piece of paper with a few solar cells to power it, and a few small printed circuit boards. They look professionally done, not hobbyist level, and that's telling me that they're probably among the many professionally designed and produced boards used by hobbyists for many things that the developers never dreamed of people doing. Which means I can't say "just do this" and you can launch your own pico-balloon.
I'll keep looking for that, and hope to be able to round it up soon.
Ham operators have historically been on the cutting edge of electronics. I'm not surprised by this achievement.
ReplyDeleteComax valley amatuer radio club?
ReplyDeleteInteresting.
ReplyDeleteNote that the one that made the news was, as far as I could tell, FAR larger than these - many feet across and tall, not 1 to 2 feet.
Jonathan
The specific forum the author is hunting for is the tracking thread on the **Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)** or its direct hub at **groups.io/g/picoballoon**.
ReplyDeleteBecause the groups.io archive requires an authenticated login and moderator approval to deep-search specific historical design logs, I cannot pull the raw, direct link to the exact forum post from here. However, looking at the technical data from the flight records (such as the **K9YO** and **KD9WVO** series trackers frequently logged on the NIBBB databases), the exact breakdown for that specific run is cataloged on the public side of the **NIBBB Locate and Track Log**.
The precise details of that flight's technical design, including the folded paper schema, solar array configuration, and the Traquito/QRP Labs tracker software details, are hosted right on their build logs at **nibbb.org**.
If you want to pass it along, the public archive page where the group actively updates these exact multi-lap circumnavigation stats and hardware notes is:
[https://nibbb.org/links-to-locate-and-track/](https://nibbb.org/links-to-locate-and-track/)
Heh. You'd think doing a web search on the station call would get you oodles of results.
ReplyDeleteBecause there's an active ballooning group here, I've seen some presentations on it. Yeah, those boards, and attendant hardware, are really tiny. I think there's one guy who designs them, and orders in bulk from a fab shop, such as PCBWay. Maybe it's a Traquito.
- jed
https://sites.google.com/view/picoballoonsbyk9yo/transmitter
ReplyDeleteYour internet search engine is recording every site you visit. You should be able to look back at your history to find the exact page address.
ReplyDeleteNot universally true. Some of us take precautions.
Delete- jed
ko6fe seems to be a person's name. https://www.radioreference.com/db/ham/callsign/?cs=KO6FE
ReplyDeleteDr. Dwight G. Jones, DDS, is a practicing dentist in Crescent City, California. He sees patients at the Open Door Community Health Centers (specifically the Open Door Community Health & Dental clinic), located at 550 E Washington Blvd, Crescent City, CA 95531.You can contact his office or schedule an appointment by calling (707) 465-6925.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jeff D. Nice but I had looked up KO6FE before I posted the picture last night. I hadn't checked for something like whatever returned that he's a practicing dentist. I'm on groups.io, so I could join the picoballoon group easily.
ReplyDeleteI was USAF Crypto/Switch maintenance that cross trained to Ground Radio which includes Satcom and microwave. As a civilian job I used my USAF High Reliability Solder training to build some Strawberry Pie processor equipment for friction measuring equipment for runways. It was a way out there design that took 2 months soldering up a multi-layered chip board and it worked. I can see anybody that had High Reliability Solder training able to accomplish building this glider.
ReplyDelete