I’m now at the World Ballon Championships in Michigan, USA, helping the two Swedish balloons with weather observations using the Windsond system. It’s a day and a half left of the week-long competition. It’s a wonderous sight to see a hundred giant balloons suspended in the sky while the rising sun slowly dissolves the morning mist.

So far we released eleven Windsonds. There’s a lot of practical issues to consider and we learned some good lessons along the way. The first lesson was that corn fields are hard work to wade through… After that, I added a feature to predict the landing location if detaching the sond at different altitudes. It proved quite accurate and very useful to make the sond recovery easier.

The competition runs at about six o’clock in the mornings and about six o’clock in the evenings. That leaves a few hours for extra development in the day but in the end there’s not much spare time. Features such as multiple sonds at the same time and lower energy consumption have to wait to another occation.