I was on the #hamradio channel on IRC this morning where people were watghing the progress of the Iowa High Altitude Ballon (IHAB) operating with callsign W0OTM-4. We saw it drift up to an altitude of about 88K feet, before descending. They had a 20m beacon, an APRS beacon running on 2m, and a cellular telephone tracker. Very cool. Hopefully, they’ll have some photos soon.

iHAB Iowa High Altitude Balloon.

Addendum: Using aprs, i tracked both the balloon and the chase vehicle (callsign W0OTM-2) and showed the complete groundtrack of both. Pretty neat.

Red track is the balloon, Blue is the chase vehicle