Pico Balloons
9/4/2026
I attended a presentation by Bill Brown WB8ELK on Pico Balloons at Hamvention 2022 in Dayton. After returning home I ordered all the electronics you need for the tracker but never got around to ordering the balloons. A few months ago I found that there was a cheaper balloon from Amazon you could use for $3 vs the $25 Japanese balloons that were previously recommend(and you had to by 10, so $250). I built out the tracker and launched the balloon to great success. Here is the tracking website for it:
https://wsprtv.com/?cs=aa0o&ch=489&band=20m&start_date=2026-05-27
Launching at 7:30am, I received no spots and thought it was a failure as I broke the strain relief off the antenna and also a couple of the solar panels during the launch. Around 10am it started reporting. I realize now that it needs the sun to be up higher to get enough voltage for the raspberry pi pico to boot up. The balloon went south and spun around under Cuba for a few days then headed out over the Atlantic, crossed Africa, then Asia, then when around Japan down to near Guam where it turned around and then lost contact. I’m guessing the antenna probably gave out and the tracker fell off.
To build it, I followed all the directions on this site:
Here is the PowerPoint presentation I gave at the St Petersburg Amateur Radio Club today:
I’ll be launching more, you can track them on the sidebar link for Pico Balloon Flight Log