Okay, so, I decided to do something a little crazy the other day. I built and launched a weather balloon. Yeah, you heard that right, a weather balloon. It wasn’t just for fun, though. I wanted to see if I could use it to collect some data from way up high, you know, high-altitude data analysis.
First off, I had to gather all the stuff I needed. The main thing, of course, was the balloon itself. I got one of those big ones, like six feet wide when it’s filled up. And I needed helium to inflate it, just like the kind they use for radiosondes. Speaking of radiosondes, I built a little instrument package, similar to that. I packed it with sensors to measure things like air pressure, temperature, and humidity. I even threw in an accelerometer and a magnetometer, just to see what kind of flight data I could get.
I put all of these sensors into a payload. The payload needs to be light so that the balloon can carry it up high. I used a Raspberry Pi to record all of the data from the sensors. It worked pretty well and I was able to have the Pi record temperature and other environmental factors.
Now, I didn’t want to lose this thing, so I had to figure out a way to track it. I decided to use amateur radio. I got my license a while back, so I knew the basics. It’s actually pretty common for people to use amateur radio to communicate with their high-altitude balloons.
The launch day finally came, and I was pretty excited. I filled up the balloon with helium, attached my homemade radiosonde, and let it go. It went up pretty fast, about 1,000 feet per minute. That’s what I was hoping for. The whole point was to get it up into the upper atmosphere to collect data. There are different kinds of weather balloons, you know. Some are designed to burst and fall back down, and others are called “zero pressure” balloons, which are bigger and designed to stay up longer.
As it ascended, I tracked its location using the radio and watched as the data started coming in. It was pretty cool to see the temperature drop and the pressure change as it got higher and higher. This is just the first step, and I’m excited to see what kind of insights I can get from this high-altitude data analysis. In the future, I want to refine my methods so that other people can repeat the experiment and we can gather more data.
It was a bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to put everything together and make sure it all worked. But I think it was worth it. I mean, how many people can say they’ve launched their own weather balloon?