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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."
Sending up weather balloons to cover large rural areas rather than putting up towers?
To answer this question, we have to look deeply into the psychie of the average rural-area yokel. Does he prefer shooting up towers with buckshot or shooting down balloons with a high-caliber rifle. Which is more economic for the redneck? Will ammunition sales at WalMart effect this decision.
Is it cheaper for the phone companies to patch holes in balloons or replate a tower.
I didn't see any mention of this in their story. One can only hope that they took this into account.
Keeping
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot.
Er, sorry to actually get all serious on you - but I think on the basis of your arguments there is no option but to go with weather balloons:
You cant shoot them down!
There was a "rogue" weather balloon a while back, which two Canadian air force CF-18 fighters fired more than 1,000 rounds of cannon shells into it, and the blinking thing still wouldnt come down.
I really cant see some yokel with a blunderbuss even scratching these things.
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 have worked as balloon operator at the Danish Meteorological Institute, so I can tell you how this works: The winds at higher altitudes (10km+) is rather violent, often forcing the balloon to travel 100-200 kilometers eastwards (west is the prevailing direction of the wind in Denmark) during its ascent to an altitude of 30-35km. Then, at the top, the balloon tears (at that time it has expanded to a volume of 100 cubic metres from a starting volume of 1½ cubic meter) and drops gently to the ground, the torn balloon acting as a parachute. The kit is use-and-throw-away, so there is no need to chase the descending balloons (a good thing, because 90% of the balloons I launched landed somewhere in the Baltic Sea).
78% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Not only is the fact that they are untethered mentioned, the article also contains the following sentence: "Although weather balloons have been used day-in and day-out for more than six decades, Space Data is the first company to adapt this very reliable system for wireless communications," he said.
Presumably, if this was going to be a problem, it already would have been.
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...
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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.
Has anyone else got the QOTSA reference? Wish I'd thought of it...
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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STRATSAT.h tm
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Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
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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.
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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
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...
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...
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?
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.
Uh, no.
These would be giant balloons (as in huff huff puff puff balloons, though in this case filled with helium, like at the circus) with some transmitters tied on to them.
Not exactly high tech, just thinking about an old problem in a new way.
(though the data transmitters are likely rather nifty)
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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.
Ever seen an 10 year old party balloon? I thought not. After they go up, they do come down. I just don't want to hit the repeater and batteries at 540 MPH at 20,000 feet while climbing out of the overcast layer.
The truth shall set you free!