Balloon One: Spontaneous Long-range Emergency Infrastructure from Space for Telemetry and Text

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of linking amateur weather ballooning, amateur radio, and emergency communications for the purpose of creating low-cost, easily-reproducible emergency Deployable Aerial Communications Architecture (DACA). Amateur radio and other line-of-sight communications are already widely used during disaster relief, so the vision of our work is to explore to what extent already-existing volunteer groups, which use amateur radio and other line-of-sight communications, can be better enabled to function immediately following a disaster where terrestrial infrastructure can become interrupted, especially without the need for those groups to acquire any new equipment. In this paper, we build upon ideas previously discussed by the FCC and FEMA, and discuss our experimental findings on the feasibility of using weather balloons in a DACA solution; in particular, our work especially attempts to leverage existing, already-deployed amateur radio capabilities. We conclude by evaluating our findings, mentioning some of our ongoing work in this space, including research in how to build highly-available and reusable weather balloon DACA solutions, and discuss future work we hope to see in this space. In analyzing our data, we find that our experimental weather balloon was able to successfully make radio contacts across an approximately 300-mile radius.