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SSU RF Ballooning

Written by Professor Rob Rowlands, of Sonoma State University (A final version of this article, can be found here: globehttps://ee.sonoma.edu/articles/2026/sonoma-state-engineering-students-launch-solar-powered-balloon-circles-globe ) This Spring semester, two accomplished instructors in the Engineering Department at Sonoma State University, Professor Rob Rowlands and Professor Robert (Bob) Salter, guided students in the E444L Radio Frequency Laboratory course to successfully launch…

UC Davis launches two high-altitude balloons on Picnic Day

After seeing some ground test transmissions and two partial balloon flight data sets, I had Claude.ai take a closer look at the telemetry data to see what information could be inferred. And also looked for possible sources of information for the flights. The following is some of the data about the flights, and some links…

How to File a NOTAM for Launch

Filing a NOTAM:  This needs to be 24 hours in advance, so we need to decide by our planned launch hour.  You will need the GPS coordinates you intend to launch from, the direct of travel predicted for your flight, the start and end time in UTC, and the maximum altitude you expect to reach.…

SF-HAB / NoiseBridge dual launch

On December 13 we launched a HAB balloon in coordination with a NoiseBridge meshtastic HAB launch. For the highest probability of a balloon recovery, using the amateur.sondehub.org predicted flight path, a park in Stockton was selected as the launch site. This placed the predicted landing zone between Tracy and Livermore. The initial coordinated launch time…

Kazu’s AG6NS-23 Pico Balloon Launch

At 9:25 am on November 2, Kazu launched a Yokohama pico balloon with Party Balloon Helium. His payload was a his RP2040 pico balloon tracker. This board is flying with about 40 mw of RF power output, which is about 3 times the power of previous flights. This payload used a tilted, pyramid style solar…

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