Nows and Forevers

Did an amateur radio balloon get shot down? I have got a little experience with ballooning and a lot of experience with ham radio, and this is exactly what I thought was at least one of the objects shot down over the weekend.

These balloons aren’t threats. They’re scientific projects and valuable ones, too. Schools and ham radio clubs often collaborate on these projects, which provide valuable insights into radio propagation. And they’re not that big, although they do have some microelectronics on them that you can monitor if you have the proper equipment.

I used to live five doors down from the National Weather Service office in Caribou, Maine, where at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every night they sent up a radiosonde balloon to take meteorological measurements. I used to love timing my jogs to see the balloons released, and on many occasions they used to float above my house and that was fun, too. These ham radio educational balloons aren’t any bigger than that, and they fall to the ocean eventually.

I’m not thrilled by the reality of foreign powers sending surveillance balloons over the United States, especially the big Chinese balloon. We should take action against that. But we should not send missiles to knock out an American school balloons, and we should be able to tell the difference.