I often mention how fortunate we are to have our NIBBB Team involved in making us so successful. John Walsh, W9BLN is one of our Technical Advisors, also involved with the Adler Planetarium’s High Altitude Balloon Far Horizon’s Project and GoNet Project studying Light Pollution. John provides us among other things the “know how”, to use the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Hysplit models to track our balloons. With John’s help we are now tracking both our balloons with the NOAA projected trajectory over 84 hours.

You can find NOAA, Ventusky for wind speed, APRS for each Balloon, and Sondehub links for all Pico Balloons around the world at our Locate and Track page. We are also showing maps of our projected “Best Guess” wakeup location for October 25th for both balloons. These maps will be updated every day while we’re flying on our Locate and Track page.

We finally have both balloons, K9YO and AA6DY awake and doing well. AA6DY woke at 14:52 UTC at Grid DJ66BC west of Bogota, Columbia, South America flying at 14,480 meters, 47,494 feet.

K9YO woke at 17:28 UTC at Grid DO67AX, Northwest Saskatchewan Territories of Canada flying at 12,050 meters, 39,524 feet.

K9YO was awake for an hour yesterday October 20th, at Grid CP62 over the Northwest Territories, Canada shown on the upper left corner of the map below.

For those getting our posts for the first time, please visit our home page for a slide show of our balloon launch AA6DY, on September 3rd 2022 and our solar panel build session on September 10th 2022 at https://nibbb.org/

Below is the image from Sondehub which tracks Amateur Radio Balloons around the world. K9YO-15 is over Canada and AA6DY-15 is approaching Mexico. We use the -15 designation to track our balloons on APRS and Sondehub. We may use a different designation for different flights so please check our Locate and Track page for future launches.

I’ll update our Locate and Track page for any changes to the projected path of our balloons. You can click on APRS to track our balloons in flight. 73, Cary KD9ITO