A little while back I posted about my exploration in tracking gliders that were soaring around my area with a software-defined radio and some open-sourced software.
As I had mentioned, it all started with a mysterious phone last summer. Later that fall, I got yet another call from my new glider friend, wondering, since the gliding season was over for the year, would I be interested in tracking high altitude balloons instead.
It turns out that there is a bit of an enthusiast community out there that track and if possible, recover high-altitude balloon payloads. A good majority of these balloons are the good old weather balloon that is still very much in use in our high tech world today since they can easily ride along the jetstream, but the military also use balloons in preparation for artillery exercises and there is also an active amateur radio community that use balloons to transmit radio traffic.
The central repository of all high altitude balloon knowledge can be found at habhub.org. The site includes information on how to set up a tracking station using a software-defined radio dongle - similar to the one I used for tracking gliders.
Setting up a receiving station is fairly well documented at the site, so I won't really focus on how to do that since I will leave that to the experts at Habhub to explain. But I did find details a little skimpy on what sort of antenna to use.
