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Build Your Own Weather Balloon
Leeji writes "Here is an interesting read about one geek's project to build and launch a weather balloon. The flight recorder is a small $200 Soekris Engineering computer running Bering Linux. It also uses a Garmin GPS, HAM packet radio, an automated Aiptek Pencam Trio digital camera, army surplus batteries, and lots of geek duct tape."
no seriously... why would you want to undertake a project like this? I highly dought its for the weather aspect of the project. More likely, I think the builder created the whole project just as a large experiment(as he said several times in the article), and this sort of thing I can relate to and encourage.
So lets think, if I was going to create a large complicated experiment, that involves fairly delacate equipment, would I want to have it floating nearly 80,000 feet in the sky? Thereby greatly increasing the chances of not getting the equipment back in one peice?
Now if it was up to me, I would choose an experiment that wasn't so prone to breaking things(or landing things on the middle of a freeway). For example I would mod my car with some sterio/radio/computer equipment... or set up a large wireless network in my neighborhood... or something to that effect.
Just becuase I made the first post doesn't mean that im a troll...
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
The weather channel gets their data from hourly
observations taken by weather observers. Every hour
on the hour, everywhere around the world, weather
observers all go outside at roughly the same time
and measure temp, dewpoint, wind direction and
speed, cloud coverage, ceiling, etc. and put it
into an "observation" that is sent to one of the
weather hubs. Then big computers generate surface
charts. Other big computers run analysis on that
data and spit out forcast models. Those models are
then sent out to people that want them. There are
usually really lame errors like weather fronts
being truncated or way off. The "forecaster" then
modifies these projected models and incorporates
then into his forecast, then sents his forecast
for his area back out to the big computers. The
weather channel then pays to steal that forecast
information from the big computer, and put it on
their screen doing little to no actual work in
the process. They also buy their pretty satellite
images from someone like kavouris probably.
Weather balloons, along with PIREPS or "Pilot
Reports" fill in some of the blanks in the upper
atmosphere and over the oceans, but I'd hazard
to guess that doppler radar technology that allows
you to know wind direction and speed at a great
distance away and great altitude is slowly filling
at least part of that.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
You've just got to be kidding me.
When sending up weather balloons, flying model airplanes/rockets, making robots or building home computers in your garage are cause for suspicion, then perhaps it's time to re-evaluate what a "free society" is. Hrm, maybe the Canadian winter is worth it... wait, Mexico's warm!
Now shut up and hand over that those Lego Mindstorms!
-=sig=-
The Mobile GPS Demonstration Platform project, which has even more geek coolosity than weather balloons. ;-)
Chaeron Corporation
I've never really understood how so many dupes show up on Slashdot. Until now.
I stumbled on this site when I was trying to figure out how many solder points would go into a home-made modem for a bbs. I thought it was cool, and didn't recognize it as a dupe even though I read /. The page-views were in the low hundreds, so I felt safe that it hadn't seen much traffic. So I submitted it.
Feel free to troll in response to this, because I won't reply to them anyways. But for those with an open mind, you might like to know one way a dupe can legitimately happen.
It all goes downhill from first post
Hams have also frequently used these balloons for lifting massive quantities of wire for 160M antenna farms.
Amazing magic tricks