In some recent posts, I wrote about the opportunity I was given to help organize and lead MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s first amateur radio course alongside Jon Schoenberg, AA1FH. The amateur radio course was born out of a desire to try something different that was perhaps more tangential to people’s day jobs than the typical class. The result was way more successful than I could have originally planned for. In essence, the troops were thirsty for more.

At about the time the course was beginning to wrap up, our Technology Office was launching a new initiative called for a Build-Your-Own-X course in which the participants define the X. To give you a bit of background, the Lab has a Build-Your-Own-Radar course that I believe has been going on for close to a decade now. It used to be taught at MIT campus in Cambridge, but has since grown some legs and also moved to the Lab in Lexington as well as in our Beaverworks program to provide a STEM opportunity for high schoolers. The course has steadily evolved from acquiring lumped circuit parts piecemeal from distributors to supposedly having it’s own SKU from Digikey. (Looking around, however, I can’t find it, so when I do, I’ll update this post.)

Our Technology Office wanted to reproduce the radar course’s success with another class, so I pitched an idea about a High-Altitude Balloon Carrying Amateur Radio (HABCAR). The wrinkle for this project is that it would attempt to build a global circumnavigating balloon (like many hams have already done — you can read about it from QRPLabs) which would carry diverse sensor payloads. For instance, ionospheric sounding data is notoriously difficult to collect over the ocean. These little gems would definitely do the trick. And, having a WSPR transmitter available (also from QRPLabs), would allow us to radio down our telemetry and other associated sensor data. One could even imagine sending down SSTV images which are captured by small lightweight cameras compatible with Raspberry Pis. There are of course many fun technical challenges, but I work with a small army of smart folks, so we can figure it out!

I ended up again enlisting Jon Schoenberg’s (AA1FH) help as well as Dave Cipolle (W1SZ). Some of you may know Dave from the VHF contests twice a year on Mt. Greylock. He’s the no-fear fellow who’s climbing the towers.

After two pitches, we found out today that our project has received $50K of funding to develop a working prototype and preliminary class materials to be delivered by the end of August 2019! To say I am thrilled would be an understatement! I hope once many of the details are ironed out, this is something I can help out with the club’s already successful HAB program.

If you’ve been following my posts about this, I am really looking forward to updating you all with the progress. Besides, blogging about it is a good way to document the entire process. And, as I have said a few times on the site, it’s pretty damn hard to play radio at home when you have a baby. So, I feel fortunate to be in the position I am at work.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for some updates!

73,

Brian, AB1ZO