[MLB-WIRELESS] Slashdotted weather balloon experiment

[Ash Nallawalla]

> From: paul van den bergen

> especially if there is a north-westerly wind...  It may reach
> NZ, ofcourse, 
> but likely the gas will have leaked by then and it'll become 
> an underwater 
> wireless node in the Tasman sea... If it floats and you did 
> it often enough, 
> you could probably connect an IP tunnel to wireless groups in 
> NZ... then 
> again, if you did that many, you might be able to _walk_ to NZ...

Talking of slightly bigger balloons:

At the bottom of my page http://crm911.com/ash/ there is a link with
photos of the kind of balloon our boffins at RAAF Academy worked on in
the late 70s and early 1980s.  They would launch the balloon at Alice
Springs because the winds at very high altitudes (70,000 ft) near the
Equator are very directional and sometimes the balloon would go around
the world a few times.  The challenge was to bring it down somewhere
over Australia and more often than not the balloon would crash somewhere
else.  They cost a fortune, so as a junior officer in 1983/4 I gingerly
put up my hand and suggested that they carry a morse code beacon that
transmitted in the amateur band.  A couple of us RAAFies built the
encoder and we asked Les Jenkins (?) (who had helped build Australis
OSCAR 5 at Melb Uni - our first Aussie amateur satellite) to build the
transmitter.  I can't remember its callsign, but we had radio amateurs
report the balloon's progress across the world.  The beacon gave more
confidence to the researchers, and they let it go around the world a
couple more times and collected valuable data.  Unfortunately the
balloon went down somewhere near Reunion Island west of WA.

- Ash
Ex VK3CIT/ZL4LM


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