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There are three airports and one millitary base within the likely landing zone!
"Jolly Grant Airport" (Dehradun Airport) is about 40KM away, "Chinyali Saur" airstrip is 43KM away and "Sarsawa" air base is about 60Km away. The millitary base is in your own town!
A typical balloon flight will be 1 hour and the maximum height can be 20Km where wind speeds can be very fast (>100Km/hr) so it might travel great distances. These balloons are not like the ones at a party, they are huge when inflated and at high altitude, you can fit a house inside one of them. They are a very serious hazard to aircraft so you need to find a launch site well away from built up areas and confirm with airports there are no planned flights along the expected route.
As Zainka points out, it would be a good idea (the US launches did it) to include a low power, low frequency beacon in the payload. To send video you need to use high frequencies, VHF, UHF or higher but signals at those frequencies do not travel well at ground level. They tend to be 'line of sight' only so when the package lands (assuming it isn't smashed to bits!) the transmission range may only be a few hundred metres making it difficult to locate. A low frequency beacon (~2MHz) would allow more conventional hand held direction finders to locate it over a much greater distance.
Brian.
"Jolly Grant Airport" (Dehradun Airport) is about 40KM away, "Chinyali Saur" airstrip is 43KM away and "Sarsawa" air base is about 60Km away. The millitary base is in your own town!
A typical balloon flight will be 1 hour and the maximum height can be 20Km where wind speeds can be very fast (>100Km/hr) so it might travel great distances. These balloons are not like the ones at a party, they are huge when inflated and at high altitude, you can fit a house inside one of them. They are a very serious hazard to aircraft so you need to find a launch site well away from built up areas and confirm with airports there are no planned flights along the expected route.
As Zainka points out, it would be a good idea (the US launches did it) to include a low power, low frequency beacon in the payload. To send video you need to use high frequencies, VHF, UHF or higher but signals at those frequencies do not travel well at ground level. They tend to be 'line of sight' only so when the package lands (assuming it isn't smashed to bits!) the transmission range may only be a few hundred metres making it difficult to locate. A low frequency beacon (~2MHz) would allow more conventional hand held direction finders to locate it over a much greater distance.
Brian.