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Amateur Radio Space Balloon Page Alternatives

(Flying APRS)

For QSO, high altitude and near space Amateur Radio & APRS Ballooning

There may be clever if not even better ways to get up in the air than as to

the common weather balloon with RF instruments payloads.

Three outside the box ways to getting up up, up and away!.

(1) Lawn chair man method (without human payload).

Recently A Tennessee group ( Spirit of Knoxville ) has attempted several transatlantic balloon flights

After several learning curve failures it looks like they still hope to have a successful flight.

One of the big problems of transatlantic ballooning is trying to obtain a stable high altitude in order to grab the proper wind streams.

However on there last flight ballast needed to control the balance of altitude was early released to stave off a small leak in the balloon material.

Despite the complete release of ballast the balloon met it's end on top a mountain pine tree.

Possible Solution: I think I may have an idea to help prevent such a loss in the future.

I recently read in the news about lawn chair balloonist did who had a fairly successful flight using dozens of party balloons strapped

to a lawn chair. As opposed to solely relying on liquid ballast the lawn chair balloonist used a bb gun to pop excess balloons.

Amateur radio gear required for transatlantic ballooning would certainly be almost five to tens times less than the weight of a man !

Hence a lot fewer balloons would be required than a human based payload.

This method might provide a highly resilient way of balancing ballast during a long term unmanned transatlantic flight.

Of course rather than having a BB gun to pop balloons perhaps there is another way.

Estes Rockets use a small Estes Model Rocket Igniters.

These fuses could be run up to specific "ballast" balloons with wire wrap wire in the lawn chair scheme.

Naturally lightweight wire wrap wire could be run back to an embedded controller with a burn current SCR type device to burn the proper ballast balloon to achieve a nominal attitude

To read about a lawn chair man from several decades ago click here

(2) Solar powered model aircraft.

Solar power aircraft is still in it's infancy. However recent developments should keep solar powered aircraft well in the sites

of the amateur radio community.

The zephyr as pictured here recently broke records by staying up 82 hours 37 minutes with a maximum altitude of more than 60,000ft !

Model plane enthusiast are already dabbling with small scale designs of this solar application. Could you see staying up

for 82 hours. How many QSO's and Ariel SSTV's could be worked in that time!

What we need is highly skilled cross hobbyist between ham radio and RC airplanes.

Click here for PDF news release of Zephyr

(3) Trash bags balloons (solar balloons)

(4) High performance rockets (with type "N" engines !)

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