There’s an attention-grabbing growth in novice ballooning: utilizing so-called superpressure balloons, which float excessive within the ambiance indefinitely somewhat than merely going up and up after which popping like a standard climate balloon. Superpressure balloons can final for months and journey lengthy distances, probably circumnavigating the globe, all of the whereas reporting their place.
You may think that an endeavor like this may be immensely tough and price 1000’s of {dollars}. The truth is, you possibly can construct and launch such a balloon for about the price of a flowery dinner out. You simply should suppose small! That’s why novice balloonists name them pico balloons.
The payload of a pico balloon is so mild (between 12 to 30 grams) that you should utilize a big Mylar occasion balloon crammed with helium to carry it. They’re additionally cheap; that’s essential since you received’t get your payload again. And since such diminutive payloads don’t pose a hazard to plane, they aren’t topic to the various guidelines and restrictions on free-floating balloons that carry extra mass.
The important advances that made pico ballooning doable had been determining how you can observe a balloon irrespective of the place on the earth it is likely to be and how you can energy such tiny payloads. Plenty of people labored on these challenges and got here up with good options that aren’t onerous or costly to breed.
What’s WSPR?
Amazingly, the worldwide monitoring of the balloon’s telemetry is completed with out satellites. As a substitute, pico balloonists make the most of an amateur-radio community known as WSPR (Weak Sign Propagation Reporter), a protocol developed by a somewhat well-known ham-radio fanatic—Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., one of many two scientists awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for locating binary pulsars.
A Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller [top left] is soldered on to a daughterboard consisting of a high-frequency transmitter and a GPS module [bottom left], that are all powered by solar panels [right].James Provost
WSPR was designed to watch signal-propagation situations for various radio bands—helpful info for those who’re a ham making an attempt to make distant contacts. WSPR also can report low-power balloon-telemetry alerts. WSPR may be very low bandwidth—lower than 10 bits per minute—nevertheless it does the job. A worldwide community of radio amateurs receives these WSPR alerts and experiences them publicly over the internet, which provides picoballoonists a strategy to observe their flights. You want a minimum of a general-class ham-radio license to launch a pico balloon, as one is required to transmit on the bands used for long-distance telemetry.
The pico balloon payload I selected to construct is predicated on the aptly named US $4 Raspberry Pi Pico board, with a solder-on daughterboard that accommodates a GPS receiver and transmitter. The parents who developed this daughterboard and related software program (to create what they name the Jetpack WSPR Tracker) have achieved a implausible job of constructing their work straightforward to breed.
You may, in precept, energy the Jetpack tracker with batteries, however in follow it could be not possible to maintain them heat within the stratosphere, the place common temperatures may be as little as –51 °C. As a substitute, the tracker runs off two light-weight photo voltaic modules. At night time, it gracefully powers down. When the solar rises excessive sufficient within the morning, the tracker powers up and begins transmitting once more.
My first pico balloon made it solely midway throughout the Atlantic earlier than going silent.
I had 5 Jetpack boards custom-manufactured in China for simply $39. The price practically doubled after including transport and tariff fees. Nonetheless that’s actually low cost, even if you add the price of the Raspberry Pi ($4), the party balloon ($10 for 2), the helium ($10 at my native grocery store), and the 2 solar modules ($7 every).
The most important sticking level I had with the Jetpack design was the liberties it takes with spurious emissions from its transmitter. Federal Communications Fee (FCC) laws name for spurious emissions to be a minimum of 43 decibels beneath the ability of the transmitted sign. However my transmitter had sturdy undesirable emissions at odd harmonics of the elemental frequency. (That’s as a result of the transmitter is a Si5351A temperature-controlled oscillator, which outputs a sq. wave, not a sinusoid.) Taking measurements, I might see that the third harmonic at 42 megahertz was solely 25 dB quieter than the 14-MHz elementary of my WSPR sign’s frequency.
As of press time, the WSPR community had tracked my balloon from the Japanese United States to the Mediterranean coast. James Provost
In sensible phrases, this shouldn’t create any noticeable interference, on condition that this transmitter places out milliwatts at most and floats miles away from the closest receiver. Nonetheless, I wished to be absolutely compliant with FCC laws, so I added traps to the antenna—easy circuit parts that hams use to permit a single antenna to work on a number of bands by altering how the antenna resonates at totally different frequencies. Every lure was product of a small inductor (4 5-millimeter-diameter loops of No. 32 magnet wire) in parallel with a 220-picofarad capacitor. I tuned them with the assistance of a NanoVNA sign analyzer by stretching the loops aside barely. I hooked up the traps on to the tracker board, in order that they quashed the spurious 42-MHz emissions on the supply. That labored nicely and added solely 0.3 grams of weight.
With my payload full, I partially stuffed my balloon with helium. You need the balloon to carry just a bit extra fuel than it takes to carry the payload off the bottom. This can give the helium room to develop because the balloon climbs to its last altitude.
My first pico balloon, launched from a park close to my dwelling in North Carolina, made it solely midway throughout the Atlantic earlier than going silent. My second went up and was by no means heard from once more. The third was certainly the appeal. It crossed the Iberian Peninsula and on the time of this writing is someplace over the Mediterranean at an altitude of practically 12 kilometers. Hopefully, it might go on to orbit the planet.
I’m a little bit puzzled in regards to the balloons’ telemetry messages obtained on the WSPR community, as they’ve been few and much between. My finest guess is that energy from the horizontal photo voltaic panels I’m utilizing is marginal, with the winter solar being so low within the sky. That’s one thing I ought to have thought of earlier than launching the primary balloon simply 24 hours after the winter solstice!
This text seems within the February 2026 print concern as “Lengthy-Length Novice Ballooning.”
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