Just an enquiry,# Recently I spotted a weather balloon at very high altitude and as I as watching it burst(or at least vanished from sight). This set me to thinking that I would love to hunt down a used radiosonde package. I assume that they are of little or no value to the weather service. Is there anybody who tracks them with a view to recovering used units? I mean this as a passtime just to satisfy their hunting instincts. If so how would it be accomplished? Do these units continue to transmit after the balloon has deflated?
It's unlikely that you saw a weather baloon.. they aren't used very much any more, if at all. The current technology for weather data is by satellite instrumentation.
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Tweetldee
Tweetldee at att dot net (Just subsitute the appropriate characters in the
address)
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be that radiosondes were equipped with a little parachute, and had a postage-paid label on the side. If you found one you were supposed to drop it in a mailbox and it would get sent back to whoever put it up.
I've got one here that xmits on 406 MHz, and one that does 1680 MHz. Army artillery units use them for local wx conditions, cops have been known to use them for el-cheapo car tailing beacons. A google search on Vaisala should bring up a manufacturers web page.
Radiosondes are used extensively throughout the globe, the most modern version use GPS technology but these are fairly expensive.
Amateur(Ham) Radio operators have been involved in such track and locate missions as an adjunct to the 'Fox Hunt' section of their hobby. I have 'watched' this activity and very often they land in accessible parts. In one case here in Australia when it did land within a km or three of a mountain road it landed up the top of and extremely high tree. They then employed the services of the local archery club to shoot it down a few weeks later!
The main frequencies of transmission seem to 1680Mhz & 406 Mhz. They are generally not designed to stop transmitting, that function would generally occur after either battery failure or the more dramatic impact with terra firma! They are uneconomical to recalibrate after impact so I dont know of any Met service that recovers them.
By contacting your local Met. service and working your way into the engineering or training area you may be able to obtain one or two units that failed/were rejected before release. Unfortunatley under some contracts even these are returned to the manufacturer under warranty clauses.
Hope this gives you a better insight into the industry that uses them
Harvey A Met tech
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