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.

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.

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).

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

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

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