This morning, 2/21/2023, I was one of three members of the West Georgia Amateur Radio Society to be interviewed about weather balloons, pico balloons, and amateur radio in general on WLBB. You can listen to the interview here.
The West Georgia Amateur Radio Society is in the very beginning stages of planning to launch a pico balloon. These are Mylar balloons (just like the silver party balloons) with an incredibly light payload transmitting its location using APRS or WSPR. These balloons are inflated just enough to reach the jet stream and then stall out there, allowing them to travel thousands of miles. Some have even traveled around the world.
WX4BK gave a presentation at our last club meeting about the WSPR mode that our balloon will be using. You can view it as a PDF here, and as a PowerPoint here.
We will keep you updated on the progress of our project and the information to track it once it's in flight.
Pico Balloon Payload (Image by WB8ELK)
Links to track (Callsign will be W4FWD) :
It's launch day! We will be meeting at 9 AM at the VFW Fairgrounds (1625 Bankhead Highway, Carrollton GA). We plan to launch around 10, or whenever everything is ready. See this link for the current flight prediction. Keep in mind that varying ascent or descent rates will stretch or compress that part of the path, but the general shape of the flight prediction is what to watch. Take a look at the predicted burst point and landing site. The distance between them is 5.0057 miles, and the heading from burst to landing is 284.55 degrees. Once we know the actual burst point, we can get very close to the landing site before it lands by using this tool to calculate that point based on distance and heading.
We will begin communications on the W4FWD repeater (146.640, negative offset, 131.8 hertz tone), See the Incident Radio Communication Plan linked below to see the repeater, balloon, and APRS frequencies. We may use the balloon uplink frequency for simplex communications on the ground at the landing area. The WB4GNA repeater is also a good alternative (147.090, positive offset, 131.8 hertz tone).
You can track the balloon on aprs.fi here. In that link, I've set the track tail length to three hours to cover the whole flight. If you would like a way to track the balloon alongside the prediction on your mobile device, you can click here, save the KMZ file to your device, and open it in the Google Earth app.
Flight Day Resources: