A Custom Radiosonde Design for Environmental Measurements Over Maritime Areas

Radiosounding is the process of collecting measurements of atmospheric parameters (pressure, temperature, relative humidity) over a range of altitudes above ground. A sensor package is attached to a lighter-than-air balloon and released to fly over the area of interest. Measurements are relayed to the ground by radio. This technique provides the basic, essential data used for weather forecast worldwide. The work here reported was aimed at designing, building and testing a custom radiosonde system, including the sensor package, the ground station and the lifting balloon infrastructure, to perform environmental sounding over maritime areas. The chosen architecture is based on a simple centralized controller architecture with the low data rate radio link provided by a LoRa transceiver. The paper presents the design of the system and the results of laboratory and ground tests. Very satisfactory performance has been demonstrated, including long range transmission in realistic conditions.