10-year-old radio amateur Max W0MXX has been building Amateur Radio APRS transmitter payloads to act as tracking beacons and launching them into the stratosphere

Max is a member of the Medway Balloon Society and has recently launched his third balloon flight WB-3.

In early June, Max launched “WB-2” which only captured about 30 seconds of video footage due to a hidden trash folder full of tests. WB-2 also required the help of a tree climber to retrieve the payload (where all the electronics and software are located).

Max then successfully launched, tracked, and recovered (using Ham Radio technology) WB-2.5 which Max called an “epic moment.” That payload had a great deal of footage with one small problem which they resolved in the field.

“Now it didn’t go perfectly due to some kind of automatic white balancing and the footage ended up tinted completely red so we had to color correct it,” said Max, who will enter fifth grade in the fall.

WB-3 had more weather sensors and flew with some science experiments.

Medway and Millis story from August 2021 - https://www.millismedwaynews.com/2021/08/02/364393/rising-fifth-grader-launches-second-weather-balloon-max-kendall-is-now-working-on-a-third-with-the-medway-balloon-society