Hello,

This is an amateur balloon launch announcement that may interest North
European amateur radio operators. The Finnish balloon project Ilmari
will (finally) launch a balloon on August 11th, 2007, at approximately
06 UTC from Padasjoki (latitude N61° 21', longitude E025° 03',
Maidenhead square KP21MI). That is today, within 5 hours or so of this
posting, sorry for the late announcement. The flight is expected to last
from 3 to 6 hours and touch down around 30 nm north-east from the launch
site.

Ilmari is more than just a typical balloon, for example it carries a
23cm ATV transmitter and a 2m up/70cm down linear transponder
(cw/ssb/digital), in addition to more typical 80m CW beacon and 70cm
APRS transmitter. If Ilmari reaches its projected height of 25
kilometers, it should be workable from most parts of Finland, Sweden,
Estonia, Latvia and north-west Russia. It maybe possible to receive
Ilmari in northern parts of Lithuania and eastern parts of Norway. The
balloon will use callsigns OH2SIX-11 and/or OH2SIX-12, they should be
visible in the APRS-IS during the flight.

For more information and instructions on how and where (frequencies) to
work Ilmari, have a look at
http://www.kolumbus.fi/michael.fletcher/ilmari.htm and
http://wiki.ham.fi/Ilmari-2007 for a kind of launch log.

Tapio