Test flight using LoRa based telemetry subsystem for stratospheric balloons

Abstract

This article presents a stratospheric balloon telemetry subsystem based in wireless communication protocol LoRa, which is a long-range and low power consumption protocol mainly used for Internet of Things. The stratospheric balloons are great devices for research, they are mainly used to measure climatic variables, although they can also be used to test flight for satellite instruments because the atmospheric conditions in the stratosphere are similar to those experimented by a low orbit satellite. The goal is to ensure a reliable point to point communication link, between the stratospheric balloon and the ground station to track the real-time location and store the latitude, longitude and altitude information in a database for post-processing data analysis and plotting.