Hi all,
Balloon link: https://tracker.habhub.org/#!mt=roadmap&mz=2&qm=All&mc=26.66531,-46.96101&q=!RS_*;nu6xb-11
The balloon spent its night traveling north east on an arch-path towards Portugal and Spain. It is traveling at a speed of 60-70Mph, and according to the weather maps is riding the lower part of the jet stream — hence the speed. Overnight it likely hit land around the city of Lisbon taking a south east turn towards Malaga.
The Balloon pope up on the maps last night at 12:23am PST (8:23 UTC) just 70 miles north east of Malaga, Spain. The balloon then kept a mostly south east path at an altitude of 24,000’ and 60+Mph. One hour later it crossed into the Mediterranean Sea, 60 miles east of Malaga. We were able to monitor it for another 30 or so minutes over the sea. The last packet was received around 2am PST 1/3 of the way between Spain and Morocco.
So — where will It go to?
To answer this, we can get help from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA. Is a scientific agency within the department of commerce. From Wikipedia: NOAA focuses on the conditions of the oceans, major waterways, and the atmosphere. NOAA warns of dangerous weather, charts seas, guides the use and protection of ocean and coastal resources, and conducts research to provide understanding and improve stewardship of the environment. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Oceanic_and_Atmospheric_Administration)
As part of its activities, NOAA collects atmospheric data, and runs prediction models. It also makes its models and data available for amateurs like us to run! In particular, the HYSPLIT model is very useful to predict the path that the balloon may take. HYSPLIT (Hybrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory) is used to compute air parcel trajectories and deposition or dispersion of atmospheric pollutants. NOAA has a web interface to enter starting possible positions and times, and predicting the paths these parcel of air would go to.(https://www.ready.noaa.gov/hypub-bin/trajtype.pl)
The attached image shows prediction paths for our balloon. Each color represent a possible path (based on perturbations), each dot represent an hour. Our balloon, according to this Map is now in Algeria, will cross to Libya and then take a path along the Mediterranean Sea and intersect land with either north Israel, or Lebanon. The downside of this path, is that there are no APRS base stations along the way. The first ones will be either in Israel, Cyprus, or Lebanon. Unfortunately, the balloon will cross these at night time (about 28 hours from now). The slowest predicted path may result in the balloon transmitting over. Damascus into a Lebanese or Israeli station. Indecently, one of the paths crosses over my home in Israel (what are the chances!).
So, unless we hear from the balloon in the Middle East, we won’t hear from it for a while. In 72 hours the balloon is projected to be in north India. It may pass New Delhi or cross the Himalayas from Nepal to Tibet. Since the mountains there are over 7200m, I am not sure if the balloon will go over. The next places where there are APRS stations are in China, South Korea and Japan. I’m hopeful that we will. Hear from it again within. 5-6 days. Cross your fingers.
For a beautiful animation of the winds at different heights you can go to: https://www.camarilloweather.com/wxglobalwind.phpYou can press and drag the figures to rotate the planet. The relevant maps are the 11,500’ and the 35,000’. Our balloon is at 24000’, and gets slightly less wind speed, but similar direction as the 35,000’ one.
One last thing…. Ham radio operators often finish a QSO — or a contact with the number 73, which means — best regards. The reason for this has interesting history and is related to early form of signal compression. Signal (audio, text, image, video) compression is the essence of our modern life technology. It enables us to send, store and communicate digital media. The first (I think) form of compression used for communication is in fact the Morse Code. Morse code is made out of a series of dots (.) and dashes (-) which code letters, words and sentences. A dot is the smallest unit of time, a dash is 3 times longer. Inter element gap within a character is one unit (dot) long, between letters is 3 units long, and between words is seven times long. In order to save time — Morse designed his code by counting the frequency of letters in the English language in a New-York Times page, and assigned the dots and dashes such that letters that occur more frequently will have shorter codes, and those less frequent will have longer. For example, the most common letter in the English Language is ‘e’ which is a assigned the code dot “." — only one unit long. The least frequent is ‘Q’, which is assigned the code “- - - . -“ — 16 time units long!.
So what is 73???? In the early days of wired telegraph, telegraphers created the “wire signal”, which is a brevity code to save more time and cost when sending long messages. The well known 92-code was adopted by Western Union in 1859. The code uses numbers to represent long sentences. For example, the code 1 = “wait a minute”, 2=“Very important” and 73=“Best regards”. This is a form of higher-order statistics entropy compression!
Hope you all of a wonderful thanksgiving.
73,
— Miki