3 ms·

> Recovering them is a fun hobby This sounds amazing. How could I get into this? Is the balloon structure occasionally left intact enough to refill and reuse?

myself248 4y ago
The balloon itself pops, it's not reusable. It's nice to pick up the litter if you can get it out of the tree or whatever, but it's latex so it'll degrade. The payloads are usually in great shape unless they come down in a road and get run over. My local launch site flies RS41's and you can find photos all over the internet. There's two lithium AA's inside, a couple of STM32s, and a Ublox GPS receiver. Getting into it, just pop onto sondehub a bit past noon or midnight UTC and see what's in the air. If there's one predicted to land near you, keep an eye on it and head out. If a sondehub feeder station is nearby, you'll hear it down pretty close to the ground, and the landing prediction will usually be spot-on. If the nearest station is still a long ways off, then you'll lose it at the station's horizon which may be several hundred meters up, and what happens in the terminal phase of descent is anyone's guess. To improve this, become your own station. There's a list of receivers on the right sidebar if you click the help button. I threw rdzTTGOsonde on a random Heltec lora board I had sitting around; the board was wired for 915MHz and the sondes use 404MHz which comes in the 433MHz Rx chain. The supported_boards page says: > The 868/915 MHz version contains the SX1276 receiver chip. The chip supports both 433 MHZ and 868/915 MHz, but using different input pins. The board connects the antenna to the 868/915 MHZ input pin, the 433 MHz pin is unconnected. Theoretically the 868/915 MHZ version can be modified to work as 403 MHz receiver by directly connecting the antenna to the right pin of the chip, but this requires somewhat advanced SMD soldering skills... So a few minutes later... https://i.imgur.com/aBmvnwh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/aBmvnwh.jpg And this sonde was polite enough to come down in a parking lot where I could literally drive up to it. I didn't even get out of the car to grab it: https://i.imgur.com/qMTVhR3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/qMTVhR3.jpg (I did get out a few seconds later to pick up the balloon and throw it away.)
- runnerup 4y ago
  Amazing. Huge thanks

myself248 4y ago

The balloon itself pops, it's not reusable. It's nice to pick up the litter if you can get it out of the tree or whatever, but it's latex so it'll degrade. The payloads are usually in great shape unless they come down in a road and get run over. My local launch site flies RS41's and you can find photos all over the internet. There's two lithium AA's inside, a couple of STM32s, and a Ublox GPS receiver. Getting into it, just pop onto sondehub a bit past noon or midnight UTC and see what's in the air. If there's one predicted to land near you, keep an eye on it and head out. If a sondehub feeder station is nearby, you'll hear it down pretty close to the ground, and the landing prediction will usually be spot-on. If the nearest station is still a long ways off, then you'll lose it at the station's horizon which may be several hundred meters up, and what happens in the terminal phase of descent is anyone's guess. To improve this, become your own station. There's a list of receivers on the right sidebar if you click the help button. I threw rdzTTGOsonde on a random Heltec lora board I had sitting around; the board was wired for 915MHz and the sondes use 404MHz which comes in the 433MHz Rx chain. The supported_boards page says: > The 868/915 MHz version contains the SX1276 receiver chip. The chip supports both 433 MHZ and 868/915 MHz, but using different input pins. The board connects the antenna to the 868/915 MHZ input pin, the 433 MHz pin is unconnected. Theoretically the 868/915 MHZ version can be modified to work as 403 MHz receiver by directly connecting the antenna to the right pin of the chip, but this requires somewhat advanced SMD soldering skills... So a few minutes later... https://i.imgur.com/aBmvnwh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/aBmvnwh.jpg And this sonde was polite enough to come down in a parking lot where I could literally drive up to it. I didn't even get out of the car to grab it: https://i.imgur.com/qMTVhR3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/qMTVhR3.jpg (I did get out a few seconds later to pick up the balloon and throw it away.)

runnerup 4y ago
Amazing. Huge thanks