There was some discussion in S.E.D. on Google's Project Loon, where balloons flying at 50,000+ ft altitude were deployed to provide internet access to Puerto Rico until the terrestrial cell sites could be rebuilt. There was some question as to whether balloons would be able to maintain their position over the island for any length of time. It would appear that they can: The red line is the ground track of one of 3 balloons hovering over Puerto Rico now (Nov 4, 2017 at about 6:29 PDST). The screen grab was produced by: You will possibly need a paid version, which cost me $10 for a year.
Find Puerto Rico on the map. Add a filter for "HBAL" which limits the aircraft displayed to Google's balloons. Click on one of the yellow balloons and the red ground track should appear. Enjoy.
The balloons are launched from Nevada and move across the continent rather quickly. If you leave the "HBAL" filter enabled, and view the entire USA, you might see some of these balloons in transit.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Neat, You dont need a subscription. Select the Filter Icon and you can add up to 1 filter for the free version. Use 'Callsign' and Use a filter 'HBAL*' to show all the ballons over Puerto Rico.
The "*" isn't needed and doesn't seem to do anything. I don't think that FlightRadar24 can do regular expressions. Just "Callsign = HBAL" is sufficient. One can also filter for balloons using the ICAO designator. Filtering for "Aircraft = BALL" will show only balloons.
Some details, docs, and examples of filters:
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Yep. It was a great way to waste a weekend trying to figure out how it works, whether it works, and now how well it works. Well, until my DSL connection went down yesterday. I'm not on the neighbors xfinitywifi wireless connection. Must be a hint that I'm suppose to be working, not playing.
As George Harold mentioned, the wind blows in different directions at different altitudes. You can sort of see how this works using: That should show Puerto Rico in center screen. On the right side of the screen, you'll see a slider currently labeled "Surface". Slide this up and down to see what the wind is doing at different altitudes. Unfortunately, it only shows winds up to 13,500 meters (44,000 ft) so we can't see what's happening at 50,000 to 70,000 ft, where the Loon's are flying. However, it will give a good idea of how it works. Right now (8AM PST), the surface winds are blowing from the east, and at
44,000ft are blowing from the south west. Ideal would be going through a 360 degree change in direction with altitude, but that's probably unlikely.
There doesn't seem to be much information on the hardware Google is using to communicate with the ground. At an altitude of about 13 miles, and a slant range or maybe 20 miles, that's a bit far for ordinary smartphone LTE handsets operate reliably. My guess(tm) is that they're using ground stations with tracking directional antennas and local LTE repeaters, but I have no info or evidence of this. Eventually, the details will be released or leaked. I can wait.
While I'm expounding on great ways to avoid doing useful work, watching world lightning hits might also be interesting: Turn ON strikes, detectors, and sound in the lower left corner. The colors represent how long ago the lightning hit. The green lines are the propagation time delays between the lightning hit and the various
3-30KHz VLF receivers. The location is determined by trilateration or more properly, multilateration. A somewhat different map (using the same data): Click on the "gear" in the upper left for settings. More lightning maps: Some info on how it works and what's involved: Note that the maps do not show all lightning hits. My guess(tm) is 5% or less. The problem is that at any give time, there are about 40 strikes per second world wide. No way to display all of them in real time.
We return you now to reality.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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