Talk:Balloon Experiments with Amateur Radio

Images
Has anyone contacted this group(s) to see if they have any images that we can upload? I live in Edmonton and can probably help from this end.--Canoe1967 (talk) 08:03, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I did on Oct 13, 2009 and it went nowhere. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 12:11, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Verification
This article's section on BEAR-5 has referneces that fail verification. The article claims that a certain call sign will be used for tracking and links to a site providing geo tracking for that call sign. The track provided was active on May 20, 2013, but makes no indication that these movements belong to BEAR-5. The data is apparently self-published, and published by the subject of the article, and not very reliable.

A link to the BEAR website for a launch in April 2010 further compounds the confusion, since the link gives a specific date but the article says the dates and locations are "not yet announced". Perhaps the article needs to be updated, but the linked sources doesn't establish the reason for the launch given in the article.

I've tagged these issues in the article. -- Mikeblas (talk) 18:03, 27 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for investigating this. I've added references verifying date of launch, call sign and a wiki link for frequency. The launch date is a primary ref, but likely reliable. The second ref could be considered secondary, as a number of hams reported listening to the signal, although I cannot verify that they are independent of BEAR. --Mark viking (talk) 19:20, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The arps.fi site doesn't seem to substantiate anything in the article. Can you explain how it does? As far as I can tell, the site lists a bunch of QSLs for the station in May of 2013. There are some older reports, but none as old as the BEAR-5 launch date, and none that mention BEAR-5 specifically. -- Mikeblas (talk) 21:25, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
 * You're correct, it is confusing and the dates are wrong for BEAR-5. Perhaps tracker IDs were somehow reused? At any rate, I found a better, but still primary, reference that verifies the two tracker IDs used for the BEAR-5 mission. See if it is more to your liking. --Mark viking (talk) 22:16, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I've also marked the claim for the heaviest payload mass. The referenced website has a design that makes persistent linking impossible, but the payload record I find there is many times the claimed record-tying amount given here. Once a good reference is found to substantiate this claim, it should be formatted with a cite tag instead of an inline external link. -- Mikeblas (talk) 21:33, 27 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I am afraid I don't understand your criticism here. There is no payload record mentioned in the BEAR-5 section of this article, and there is no inline external link in that section either. Both citations are well-formatted web citations, as far as I can tell. --Mark viking (talk) 22:16, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Merge
This should be moved to be a subsection of the "Amateur Radio High Altitude Ballooning" section of the High-altitude balloon article: it's a little short to be a stand-alone article, but would be excellent as a section of the longer article. Skepticalgiraffe (talk) 21:21, 8 August 2016 (UTC)