A Beacon Suitable For Tracking Santa’s Sleigh?

High-altitude ballooning is becoming a popular activity for many universities, schools and hacker spaces. The balloons, which can climb up to 40 km in the stratosphere, usually have recovery parachutes to help get the payload, with its precious data, back to solid ground safely. But when you live in areas where the balloon is likely to be flying over the sea most of the time, recovery of the payload becomes tricky business. [Paul Clark] and his team from Durham University’s Centre for Advanced Instrumentation are working on building a small, autonomous glider – essentially a flying hard drive – to navigate from 30 km up in the stratosphere to a drop zone somewhere near a major road. An important element of such a system is the locator beacon to help find it. They have now shared their design for an “Iridium 9603 Beacon” — a small Arduino-compatible unit which can transmit its location and other data from anywhere via the Iridium satellite network.

The beacon uses the Short Burst Data service which sends email to a designated mail box with its date, time, location, altitude, speed, heading, temperature, pressure and battery voltage. To do all of this, it incorporates a SAMD21G18 M0 processor; FGPMMOPA6H GPS module; MPL3115A2 altitude sensor; Iridium 9603 Short Burst Data module + antenna and an LTC3225 supercapacitor charger. Including the batteries and antenna, the whole thing weighs in at 72.6 g, making it perfectly suited for high altitude ballooning. The whole package is powered by three ‘AAA’ Energizer Ultimate Lithium batteries which ought to be able to withstand the -56° C encountered during the flight. The supercapacitors are required to provide the high current needed when the beacon transmits data.

The team have tested individual components up to 35 km on a balloon flight from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility and the first production unit will be flown on a much smaller balloon, launched from the UK around Christmas. The GitHub repository contains detailed information about the project along with the EagleCAD hardware files and the Arduino code. Now, if only Santa carried this on his Sleigh, it would be easy for NORAD to track his progress in real time.

8 thoughts on “A Beacon Suitable For Tracking Santa’s Sleigh?

  1. Few years ago an auto-return balloon dropped glider with GPS an RPI was on youtube. However “Drone” legislation has come into effect since, so piloting or autonomously flying a glider from 50.000′ is no longer within the realm of reality.

      1. Why be pissed off at DJI? They enable people to experience the hobby. I started out with a Phantom FC40. It’s the idiots who use it to “spy” on people, harrassing them in the process. Or those assholes who fly their drone into airports who ruined it…

      1. I assume you are referring to how gps shuts down at certain speeds and altitudes. This is to prevent gps from being used in unauthorized ways. However, if you contact the manufacturer and explain what you are doing then they can usually give you a way to disable this “feature”. At least, when my high school did a launch about 6 years ago they were able to get a code to disable this without too much hassle.

    1. From experience a SPOT tracker works well not only over the ocean, but in it too fortunately… it was the only part in my payload that survived a water landing. My log includes about three hours of floating, followed by a 30 minute boat trip back to shore.

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