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originally posted by: gariac
I haven't been out to Wendover for a while, so I don't know the balloon project, but the Google balloons are very high. They are UFO sighting
generators. Tethered balloons are called aerostats.
Aerostat
originally posted by: FosterVS
When I sat down to drink my morning coffee, and looked out the window, I see what I thought at first was someone with video gear on tripod's. But after a second look, I realized those weren't camera's, but feedhorns.
originally posted by: hellobruce
looks like radio amateurs, you should have gone over and had a chat.
originally posted by: gariac
I have to assume when these aerostats are used in real life, they raise them a bit higher. That is, we just see them parked, I assume. Otherwise it seems like a lot of infrastructure for not much altitude.
A horn is a low gain microwave device. You use it if you don't want to do precise aiming. You need a little height to avoid Fresnel zones (silent H, but a Canadian for sure would know that).
Fresnel zone
So you can get the sense of what they are doing, namely communicating or painting a distant object with RF. Why they are doing it from a very public space is a good question. It could be just to see what the public can see. [Think of the poor schmuck at the DoD who has to review every Groom Lake photograph taking by civilians to determine if the base is maintaining OPSEC. In the case of these Aerostats, perhaps no amateur has published what they learned about them, so they hire some dudes to pretend to be yahoos.]