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."

Comments

NASA's Helios

[Oink.NET]

Check out NASA's Helios which uses solar power and a fuel cell concept. They expect it to fly above 50,000 ft for 96 hours. ZDNet has a story about using it for broadband internet connections.

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.

Re:Practical Concerns

[TurboThy]

The Danish Meteorological Institute launches weather balloons 8 places in Greenland even in winds of 60+ meters/second (35 m/s is gale force) and blizzards. The only thing that happens is that the balloons get stretched to ten times their original length, which looks quite funny - picture a guy in heavy winter clothing holding a 10 metres long light yellow sausage-formed object in snow storm conditions...

Balloon transmitters - nothing new

[stevie-boy]

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

USAF is running teathered ballons

[thogard]

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.

Not feasible...IMO

[vortexf5]

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.

HAPS

[haunebu]

High-Altitude Platform Systems are one of the three different delivery mechanisms defined by the 3GPP for next-generation mobile services. The systems being designed around them go well beyond this weather baloon business.

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.

Check out StratSat

[mikerich]

This sounds like an alternative to the British StratSat airship which is under construction just down the road at Cardington in Bedforshire.

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...

Been done by ham radio for years...

[AmigaAvenger]

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.