It then broadcasts the signal to anyone listening, and by including a codename, you can track a particular balloon – or payload below a balloon – to see where it’s going. This operates at a fairly low powered rate, and has a GPS built in. The best route, although the most complex, is to use a radio tracker. They need to face upright too to get a good signal. But it’s still incomplete, and there are costs with getting a subscription with one of these services. These can be bought or hired, and they can ping off the Iridium satellite network. Even if you put something take measurements, you have to recover the balloon first.Īnother option is using satellite trackers. That means that you lose track of where your balloon is until it has fallen low enough to pull in a GSM signal again. Once you get just a few thousand feet up, they go out of range. The problem with these is that the GSM network is targeted at people on the ground. These are cheap devices which you pop SIM cards into and they are able to text GPS coordinates to a phone. You can buy kits online that come with a couple of GSM/GPS trackers. My first thought was the cheap and cheerful. But the key thing is to track your balloon. Weather balloons can be bought online, and helium is readily available, even if it’s not cheap. And if a group of school kids could do it, so could we. All sorts of people seemed to be doing this all the time. To put that in perspective, the Felix Baumgartner’s “Space Jump” was from 129,000 feat or 39,000 metres – about 25% further than we went). We were aiming for about 30,000 metres or close to 100,000 feet. In particular, look for the balloon bursting at about 8:55 into the video!Įarlier this year, I gathered together a few friends to put together a plan to launch a balloon into “space” (OK – it’s the high atmosphere, and not really space. High Altitude Balloon from Adam Bowie on Vimeo. More recently I’ve launched cameras on kites with varying results.īut the ultimate must surely be those high altitude balloons that you sometimes see being launched with cameras attached to weather balloons, high above the clouds, getting into near space. We had, er, “mixed” results when a knot I tied turned out to be particularly poor. Those with longer memories may recall that I once tried to send a camera up on a bunch of helium balloons from a rooftop near work.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |