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Weather Balloons as Wireless Telephone Technology
Under the plan described in this article submitted by reader RoscoHead, "Space Data would use un-tethered weather balloons launched daily by the National Weather Service to carry lightweight wireless communications equipment to an altitude of 100,000 feet. There, at the 'SkySite,' they would relay voice and data signals to remote areas at a fraction of the cost of installing cell towers or launching satellites, company officials say."
Hope the wind doesn't pick up too much.
I am assuming that the wind at that altitude must not be as strong or persistant at that altitude. Other wise how would you keep these things from being all over the globe?? I could see haveing a controlled decent to keep them from traveling to far. However, that would seem like a pain in the butt to go chasing ballons around!!!
Isnt this the technology our government was developing that everyone claims was a flying saucer(Including the Government)
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Great, more junk to track as it fails and starts to return. Hope the commercial aircraft can avoid all of it.
The truth shall set you free!
No Really
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They float around, usually about rural areas. They usually dont draw much attention, and would be perfect for something like this. Besides unlike ballons they wont explode, burn up, or any other unpredictable situation which can happen with a balloon.
Saucers could work
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Why not just use our alien technology developed at Area51?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
On a smaller scale this could also be done with the advertising ballons. Im looking mainly networking using systems such as consume, however hills, and weather become a major problem in the highlands of Scotland. An advertising balloon, with an antenna, a bit of coax as long as the balloons hoist cable, and you have an ariel that can get nice and high for coverage, and be winched back down for gales and bad weather.
Im sure there will be many impracticality's pointed out in this idea, however, hopefully it will inspire some other ideas.
0101100101101111011101010110110101110101011100110
I realize both the weather balloons and Helios are just means to an end, but using these things for broadband internet would be way cooler than the US's second-rate cell technology, which is what they want to use the weather balloons for.
Clearly using free-floating weather balloons has a number of limitations and disadvantages.
Now we know that NASA has great plans for its solar-powered airplane -- including acting as a semi-permanent flying repeater-station, but I wonder if smaller, cheaper options might not be available.
For example... what about a much smaller (say 20-30 foot span) autonomous craft designed to soar thermals during the day (while charging its batteries and gaining as much altitude as it can) -- then revert to battery power and/or gradually descend during the hours of darkness.
If the energy required to keep these craft airborn in the longer nights of winter was greater than that availble to be stored during the day then they could carry a fuel-load to power a high-efficiency internal combustion engine (probably a very small diesel engine). Every week or so the craft would have to land for refueling and maintenance -- but that's not a big deal.
Just like the US military's Predator RPV, they could be programmed to land on a runway set aside specially for the purpose.
The cost of a smaller craft, particularly one that wasn't totally reliant on solar-cells, would likely be much less than NASA's efforts -- thus allowing more of them to be built for a given budget.
By using more craft, they could cruise at a much lower altititude than either the weather balloon or the NASA craft.
Using modern composites, low cost GPS, and other "affordable" technologies, such a craft could likely be built for less than US$10K.
Assuming a 50% duty cycle, a fleet of 10 craft could cover a huge area at a much lower cost than towers, and with the ability to dynamically vary the coverage area if required -- simply by repositioning the craft.
Is anyone else noticing that the posts are sorted from "last post" to "first post", despite specifically requesting an "oldest first" ordering? Assuming that you're browsing in the threaded mode, just check the time of various posts to see what I mean.
Is it a temporary slashcode bug, or a scary new hide-first-posts-at-the-bottom strategy?
-- a concerned troller
im just wondering what the reliability would be, would things "ping out" or people get disconnected if they were not quick enough to launch another balloon? I think relibility is a big thing and with weather being incredibly unpredictable there could be major problems to overcome, balloons going off course, colliding with objects already in the sky. Its a good idea if we could predict with great accuracy the direction in which objects will travel and where they will fall (what goes up must come down), and with over 51,000 launches a year they may need to setup a "balloon traffic control center" just to keep a tag on them all.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com
Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot.
While we are dealing with baloons, we could simply set up barage baloons around all potential targets world wide so no planes could be flown into them. At the same time, use them for not only cell phone relays, but ADVERTISEMENTS THE LIKES THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE! The adds could move like a ticker from baloon to baloon or could each act as its own billboard. Maybe even allow some X sport enthusiests to do base jumping from them if they can gym-class-climb up there?
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Over the summer (in the southern hemisphere), I worked to help launch ozone measuring balloons, (same idea, more equipment), and we launched them only in fairly calm conditions. A balloon full of hydrogen is a fairly scary prospect when it's getting blown around. Does this also mean a commercial company will be putting extra pressure on the NWS to launch in potentially unsafe conditions? Scary thought!
I wonder what would happen to the equipment? Would it be a one time launch sort of thing? Would it be damaged when those things come down? If not, How would they recover it? Also, it seems like they would have to launch a lot more of these things than they currently do in order to provide adequate coverage. It's hard to believe that this would be cost effective, but it is a very interesting idea. It might make more sense if they were able to stay aloft for more than 24 hours...
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
I was wondering that, so I looked it up. It turns out that after reaching a certain height, the weather balloon explodes from (internal pressure) and drops its payload. Usually this is a "radiosonde", a device which radios the weather conditions back to the weather station. The radiosonde weights about .3kg and is usually packaged in styrofoam to cushion the landing. Sometimes it has a parachute too.
Inside the radiosonde package there is also a self-addressed prepaid envelope so anyone who finds it can mail it back to the weather service. No kidding!
First of all, I'll have to say that I have no experience with either the weather forecasting or the telecommunication industry. But, I just find the number weird.
About 70 launch sites would be needed to cover the continental United States.
So there would have to be more than 51,000 launches a year at an annual cost is about $15 million.
That means they will release about 140 ballons each day. Firstly, I doubt whether only 140 sites will be sufficient to cover the entire continental America. Even if that's possible, it will mean that the transmission power will be quite strong. Commnunication engineers usually talk about the reuse of comm channals. What will be the implication of this?
On the other hand, $15M/70 launch sites approx equals $210000/yr/site. It seems to be a reasonable budget for reasonably large ground based relay tower.... I really cannot see the advantage for the alternative approach.
..nevermind, I really can't be bothered..
Autopilot - no control
Yeh I mean, granted theres a lot of problems with exploding baloons, aircraft, cost blah blah blah blah but what about the latency which these things'll have on data transmission? I looked into wireless broadband for my house and I read all over the place that the latency was worse than a shitty 33.6kbps connection. What would the story with these babies be?
Small Black Dog - I've for gotten my password
You'd just need a means to keep the position, don't know how the winds are up there, and if electric motors w/ propellers will be efficient at that altitude.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Not sure how common this practice is, but they have been used in the past to check out the viability of locations for land based transmitter towers like Emley Moor in the UK
of our "disposable" society.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
STRATSAT.h tm
http://www.airship.com/prod/prod_home.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Hey Cringely, when are you gonna put some passive repeaters on these babies?
It already exists, at least as a concept, I don't know if they have anything in production yet.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Tethered Aerostat Radar System does this with teathered balloons at 15,00 ft or so.
They have 12 and tend to operate about 50% of the time. They can carry up to 3400 pounds and are costing about 2.8 million per site per year.
One of these is sending signals TV to Cuba.
I have launched numerous weather balloons, and I don't believe they stay aloft for 24 hours. They only take ~2-3 hours to ascend to 30-35 Km. I doubt they take 21 hours to descend...even when slowed by a parachute, which they all carry. Also, in response to the numerous posts about aircraft safety, pilots all over the world know that weather balloons are launched by weather agencies in most countries at 1100 and 2300 GMT. It's a big sky up there. The odds of an airplane hitting one of these relatively tiny objects are extremely small.
I'm angry, and I Meta Moderate!
I was reading just recently about another company researching the same idea, but with solar powered lenticular semi-rigid blimp platforms in geostationary orbit.
http://www.lvcm.com/walden/products.html#strat
The pictures look great, they also have cargo and ecoturism lenticular blimp projects.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Did anyone else end up with "99 Red Baloons" running through their head after reading this article?
"You and I in a little toy shop
buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base, bugs in the software
Flash the message, "Something's out there"
Floating in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by."
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Very nice moron.. so you are ruining the page for IE users = rest of the trolls while hippie linux zealots are unaffected??? have you become a traitor??
It's amazing how little press these systems have received so far, since it would take hundreds of well-placed terrestrial towers or thousands of miles of buried fiber to provide similar coverage and capacity.
Blue skies, Barthy Burgers, girls...
Not until you mentioned it. :-/
:-/ :(
Now it looks like it's time to install windows and morpheus and so some video hunting.
Hope I don't get stuck w/ the cruddy euro version again. YUCK.
are much cooler, except for when they blow up.
watch out, it could be aliens! never forget roswell! :)
Would this be risky if hackers retrieved one? Think about it. All the PCS crypto IP delivered to your door. Do we want these out in the fields of America?
The truth shall set you free!
"..What?! Okay, I must be on a bad ballon, hold on... okay, wait, I see something. Lemme just drive closer to it... Drat, it's just a carnival. Hello?! Hello?!"
This will be great fun until the anti-cellphone nazis figure out they can shoot the balloons down.
StratSat is from Advanced Technologies Group and will sit at 20km altitude for up to 5 years, using photovoltaics for power.
Hopefully it will be a bit more successful than the last big British airship...
One of the major limitations to improved weather forecasts in the US and I would guess in the rest of the world is that we do not launch nearly enough weather ballons. Because our upper air data is so sparse( both geographically and timely) our models have a difficult time picking up inital conditions and forecasts are less accurate. If weather ballons could "break even" or gasp make money on every launch and there was a commercial reason to launch more often it would be a fantastic addition of weather data a very low cost. A great merging of commercial and gov uses for public gain!
Also I have launched ballons and they don't stay in the 2000ft general airspace for very long. They are VERY light weight and I have also recovered a ballon that descended by pure dumb luck once (at least I knew what it was) The parts are actually reuseable as well. The odds of this ballon actually hitting anything (plane, wild horse, telephone pole) are remarkable small. The only problem is that the NWS uses HYDROgen to fill the ballons, not Hellium. I think it saves money. BTW I work across the street from the launch center and we have a guy that smokes outside our front door. (across the street from the hydrogen storage launch facility) He always seems to remember to put his cigs out though.... We are one grass fire away from a good sized BOOM...
The original German "99 Luftballons" is a much better song.
Did the baloons lift her up and carry her off to neverneverland? Is she still a known figure in German/European popular culture?
Hydrogen isn't nearly as dangerous as everyone seems to think. It just got a bad name after the Hindenburg. What people don't seem to realize is that the Hindenburg didn't burn up because of the hydrogen inside, it burnt because the doping compound that they used was comprised of aluminum and ferrous oxide, and none of the doped panels were grounded to the framework. ferrous oxide and aluminum are extremely dangerous when mixed intimately, and the mixture that they had was extremely sensitive to static discharge.
This country is currently embroiled in a conflict with the Axis of Evil, the last thing we need is you running around with your anti-war songs! If you like this song so much why don't you move to Cuba or Canada or some other Communist country?! I'm sure Jane Fonda would be more than happy to go with you!
So the National Weather Service budget will subsidize this startup? You and I are paying to "get this off the ground"? I'm OK with paying for NWS research that American companies use, but this is corporate welfare, with the weather service performing essential longterm operational support. Will NWS also launch their competitors' equipment?
Check out the HABP page for more details, but this group and many others have been doing long range HAM radio communications for years using balloons. Stick some electronics on a balloon, along with a repeater, and you can get several hundred miles out of radios that would previously give you 20 miles.
Wired this month is carrying an article about a similar idea using blimps. From the article the blimp stays aloft for like 3 years and carries a moderate amount of wireless equipment which can provide coverage for an area about 72km in diameter. I forget the exact altitude at which they hover but it is somewhere above regular air traffic and high enough to be safe from most weather patterns. Way back when Popular Mechanics had an article about high altitude airplanes (which has been posted several times on slashdot) that would also carry high speed communications equipment. I always thought it would be rather efficient to use airborne but not quite orbital space stations to relay radio traffic. You get the coverage or a space borne satellite without the inherent cost of lighting an explosion under its ass and launching it into orbit.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
why not put a 802.11b transciever in a weather balloon and run netstumbler on it?
A little more seriously, why not buy a surplus weather balloon, tether it over your house and put a passive microwave repeater on it like John Dvorak did for his "bank shot?" Might make for a nifty way to get community wireless broadband out to the suburbs.
Make the balloons of titanium, aluminum, etc. Pack them with electronics instead of helium/hydrogen. Launch them via rockets. We could call them... Satellites?
Busy aligning my non-linear thoughts.
Sure, some folks will get better, clearer calls, but I see danger written all over this. Knowing that "what goes up, must come down", I see the landscape being littered over time with broken and deflated balloons and rusting communications equiptment.
Nader and the rest of the Green Party will have a field day with this one.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I would think that Weather ballons, running at high altitudes and changing position with the wind while transmitting cell phone traffic would require some fancy FCC footwork, and therefore wouldn't be reality much sooner than flying cars.
For some reason, when I first saw the headline I thought it said "water balloons." Doh!
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This project sounds similar to the SkyStation project. I saw some conceptual designs of the airships for this project at Skunkworks.
This concept reminds me of American Flagg, an early 80's comic by Howard Chaykin. That comic had huge numbers of balloons covering Chicago. They were acting as a huge antenna array for satellite TV though.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
The balloons pop around 100,000 feet, 2.5 to 3 hours after launch. The styrofoam radiosonde (weather instrument) take awhile to float to the ground, but are not in the air for 12 hours.
There are reliablility problems, balloons every so often ice up or pop prematurely... so they don't reach full height. However, I have yet to hear of a plane running into a weather balloon and crashing.
btw, here's me releasing a weather balloon back in 1992.
Journal
do we really want our intelligent marine friends choking on these things when they deflate and fall into the ocean? just so you rich bastards can talk on your phones from the bathroom at mcdonalds. for shame.
Pretty soon remote sounding via NOAA weather satellites will replace radiosondes. Helium is not a renuable resource, and the instrument packages sent up with the balloons are expensive, so NOAA is leaning towards phasing out balloons. 10 years from now the twice-daily weather balloon will be dead.
a large kite.
maybe similar to:
Apr 2000 QST page: 49
NE2Q's Antenna Fell From the Sky!
or http://www.total.net/~kite/
communications equipment could be less disposible, lots of possible area for solar panels, im not shure about payload, but my friends and i built the kite from the qst article and were able to hoist a ~1992 8mm video camera to about 1000 ft with no problem. more stationary than a ballon, longer flight times, just another idea...
you do realize that by "balloons" she means condoms, right?
Build an advanced unmanned aircraft for under $10K? I think that's a little optomistic.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.