Balloon & Kite Mapping

Every once in a while, my thoughts turn to the novelty of gathering areal imagery or elevating a wifi or radio repeater using a balloon or dirigible. A number of years ago I was at a Field Day event with COARES (http://www.coares.org/) and they used a weather balloon to hoist up an antenna. It's one those things that keep bouncing around in my head, periodically resurfacing.

While my current project plate is pretty full I happened upon this website today and wanted to share it, in the hopes that I'll get time to play with it myself, or someone else will do something cool with it.

The folks over at publiclaboratory.org are currently selling a balloon mapping kit: http://publiclaboratory.org/tool/balloon-mapping

The mapknitter software does some very interesting things with photographs, you should check that out if you're trying to put multiple photos together into one and extract more information.

Also you can find some more antenna-focused information here: http://www.hard-core-dx.com/nordicdx/antenna/special/baloon.html