I've been working on a high altitude balloon along with a team of volunteers that is going to take pictures during this year's solar eclipse. The balloon has a gimballed camera (or more accurately, a gimballed mirror) that autonomously tracks the sun. Real-time video is sent down to the ground via 70cm ham radio. The comms was developed almost entirely by myself, and on previous flights we've tested it to a range of 140km. Along with the real-time video, it also uses spare bandwidth to send down high resolution from several other cameras on the payload.
Aside from the project website, I also wrote up a short article on one of our previous launches. It focuses primarily on the communications system since that's my contribution to the project: https://www.scd31.com/posts/real-time-balloon-video
I hope you like it, and I hope to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
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