Collaborate Disseminate
The Great American Eclipse was a solar eclipse that passed nearly the entire continental United States back in 2017. While it might sound like a once-in-a-lifetime event to experience a …read more Continue reading Balloon to Fly During Solar Eclipse
Every now and again we stumble across something a bit unexpected, and today that’s the fact that there have been quite a few efforts at launching paper planes from as …read more Continue reading Launching Paper Planes From Way, Waaaaaay Up
Most amateur high altitude balloon payloads descend back to earth with a simple non-steerable parachute and can land hundreds of kilometers from the launch site in inaccessible areas. [Yohan Hadji] experienced this first-hand during a balloon launch conducted by his high school, which inspired him to R2Home, a GPS-guided parachute …read more
Continue reading GPS Guided Parachutes For High Altitude Balloons
Radiosondes – the telemetry packages carried aloft by sounding balloons for atmospheric weather data measurements – are regularly used by weather bureaus around the world to collect data, and there are quite a number of launches daily. Most of them are in Europe, but they also happen at many locations …read more
Meteorological organisations across the world launch weather balloons on a regular basis as a part of their work in predicting whether or not it will rain on the weekend. Their payloads are called radiosondes, and these balloons deliver both telemetry and location data throughout their flightpath. Hobbyists around the globe have devoted time and effort to tracking and decoding these signals, and now it’s possible to do it all automatically, thanks to Radiosonde Auto RX.
The basis of the project is the RTL-SDR, everyone’s favourite low-cost software defined radio receiver. In this case, software is used to first hunt for …read more
Continue reading Automated Radiosonde Tracking Via Open Source
Space balloons, where one sends instrument packages to the edge of space on a weather balloon, are a low-cost way to scratch the space itch. But once you’ve logged the pressure and temperature and tracked your balloon, what’s the next challenge? How about releasing an autonomous glider and having it return itself to Earth safely?
That’s what [IzzyBrand] and his cohorts did, and we have to say we’re mightily impressed. The glider itself looks like nothing to write home about: in true Flite Test fashion, it’s just a flying wing made with foam core and Coroplast reinforced with duct tape. …read more
Continue reading Autonomous Spaceplane Travels to 10 km, Lands Safely 200 km Away
Ever since I first learned about radiosondes as a kid, I’ve been fascinated by them. To my young mind, the idea that weather bureaus around the world would routinely loft instrument-laden packages high into the atmosphere to measure temperature, pressure, and winds aloft seemed extravagant. And the idea that this telemetry package, having traveled halfway or more to space, could crash land in a field near my house so that I could recover it and take it apart, was an intoxicating thought.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods over the intervening years, but I’ve never seen a …read more
