Re: Using balloons for wireless internet?

Author	All Replies
jober join:2001-12-13	reply to FightingBlue Re: Using balloons for wireless internet? I did testing with a 8'x16' tethered blimp. I put an AP on the bottom with a 9db omni. With the 150' rope it worked great. I used an old but new at the time 2meg zcomax450 AP in repeater mode. Also had a cat5 cable wire tied to the rope for power and ethernet. I got 15 mile to a tower that had a 24db grid with a 1 watt amp. A blimp is better then a ball because a ball will move all over the place, but the blimp would hold it's position a lot better. I had high hopes of putting up a bigger one, at about 2500' but there was to much red tape with the FAA and not to mention the people laughing and calling me crazy. This was in the mid 90's when people also said I was a dumb ass for running power over my ethernet cable.
jober join:2001-12-13	to forum · permalink · · 2005-08-22 04:06:44 ·
haggleza join:2005-08-22 ZA	I'm not sure if there are any legal obstacles, but has anybody tried using hydrogen as the lifting gas instead of helium. Some weather balloons use hydrogen. Hydrogen has a higher lifting factor and costs less than half of what helium costs. As these balloons don’t carry people the safety aspect is not so critical.
haggleza join:2005-08-22 ZA	to forum · permalink · · 2005-08-23 07:53:00 ·
Yahkin join:2003-11-28 Fort Atkinson, WI	said by haggleza : I'm not sure if there are any legal obstacles, but has anybody tried using hydrogen as the lifting gas instead of helium. Some weather balloons use hydrogen. Hydrogen has a higher lifting factor and costs less than half of what helium costs. As these balloons don’t carry people the safety aspect is not so critical. Somebody still has to fill the balloon, and that is time when you are most likely to have a problem with oxygen mixing with it...As NASA puts it...an uncontrolled fragmentation could occur. Not to mention that hydrogen is a smaller molecule than helium, so it escapes even faster. Not sure if you want to pay for all those windows that break the first time your floating hydrogen bomb explodes in a storm. :P Hydrogen is cheaper, prosthetics are not.
Yahkin join:2003-11-28 Fort Atkinson, WI	to forum · permalink · · 2005-08-23 13:36:13 ·


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