Pico-Balloon Tracker — Live WSPR Telemetry

Amateur "pico-balloons" are ultralight, often solar-powered balloons that circle the globe at 10 to 15 km altitude for weeks or months, reporting position over WSPR, the same weak-signal beacon mode ham radio operators use for propagation research. A WSPR receiver here in Oklahoma City listens 40m through 10m around the clock and decodes the U4B/Traquito telemetry protocol some of these balloons use, tracking altitude, temperature, battery voltage, and ground speed. See the log entry for more on how it works.

BALLOON / AIRBORNE WATCH

SUSPECTS

WINDOW

14d

SELECTED

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Motion from decoded Type-1 grids. 0/Q/1 callsigns are U4B/Traquito telemetry, grouped by a 2-character decode channel that's shared by many unrelated trackers worldwide (it's a small piece of the real channel ID, not the whole thing). A channel only shows up here if it has several frames AND the implied path is geographically plausible, no pole-to-pole jumps, no impossible hop speeds. Everything else is filtered out rather than shown as a false track, so this list is sometimes empty even when telemetry is being decoded.

SUSPECTED TRACKS

LOADING…

TRACK MAP · SELECT A CALL

FLIGHT DETAIL

Pick a suspect to plot its track over time.