High-Altitude Adventure with a DIY Pico Balloon

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.

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voidUpdate 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It also reminds me of the recent incident where an object (potentially a weather balloon) struck a plane windscreen and caused significant damage to it, as well as injuring one of the flight crew. I don't know if it would cause the same amount of damage given it's size, but hitting any solid object at cruising speed is sure to leave a mark

	▲	squeefers an hour ago \| parent [-]
		shouldnt be cruising in the balloon lane then

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SuperMouse an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	iberator an hour ago \| parent [-]
		lol. WPRS works like 10.000km per WATT on HF. You can't do it with 2.4ghz. Ham radio basics

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bambax 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

	▲	radeeyate 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you are wanting to send images, there are already some cool ways to do that: either SSTV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television) or Wenet, which sends them at a much higher speed: https://github.com/projecthorus/wenet.

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ajxs 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very cool! Brings this to mind: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/17/object-us-mi...

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mkarliner 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

QRPLabs sell even lighter trackers https://www.qrp-labs.com/u4b.html

and AFAIK are the goto supplier for HAB (High Altitude Ballooning) enthusiasts.