• balloon
• LoRa
• radiosonde
• sounding
• weather

Radio sounding nowadays is the preserve of a few companies that sell onerous subscriptions to clients that need atmospheric data for a variety of reasons. Moreover, in the last years the world of IoT (Internet of Things) has become an affordable field in which to invest for proposing cheaper solutions for a wide variety of applications. Following this idea, the main goal of the work here reported was to create a low-cost radiosonde that is capable of competing with those of leading companies in the industry.
The idea is to build our own radiosonde with his unique hardware and software and to make it available for the companies that need it at more affordable cost and also on dedicated flights, with specially designed payloads. This project started after a request from LaMMA, an Italian weather research institute, for a flying system capable of collecting data from the atmosphere for verifying their own data that they collect by GNSS (Global Network Satellite System) on ships. The radiosonde is lifted by the most common type of high-altitude balloon, i.e., sounding balloons, which are nowadays available at very low cost from commercial vendors and freely operable. This is because they represent a simple, quick, and economical way to launch a payload.
We designed and tested a telemetry system based on a LP-WAN protocol named LoRa (Long Range) in order to collect the data from the flying radiosonde in real-time. A brief description of the protocol, as well as the parameters setting for the configuration of the hardware, and the relative software configurations, are included. Moreover, a detailed description of the hardware and design choices is reported, with particular focus on the sensors for collecting the relevant atmospheric properties, i.e. pressure, temperature and relative humidity.
The organization of the launch phase was carried out thanks to the experience collected during these last years with dozens of launches from the Space System laboratory. In particular we studied a quick, reliable and low personnel required launch sequence that can add to the project of the radiosonde the possibility of being flown from any site. This is not only something that discriminates our radiosonde from others similar products but allows also to enlarge the number of possible interested companies. One example of challenging site from which we can launch is a volcano slop, for example to study the volcano’s ash cloud properties. In the test phases of this work, we performed two launches from a moving ship.