Stuck in a bowl

[jamesneuen]

Actually, we used a system you might be interested in. We used it to look for drug boats when no aircraft support was available.

We took a camera with a 360 degree control, mounted it underneath a weather balloon before inflating it with helium and using the cable as a "string". We could see for miles using the zoom on the camera.

I'm not saying to do it for surveillance purposes but I imagine 5 or 6 of the 12inch diameter balloons from the dollar store could get your antenna pretty high up there without all this fancy shmancy equipment.

Take that with a grain of salt and if your wife asks how you managed to run a wire over the trees to a power line 200 feet away and shock yourself, I know nothing.

[ak474u]

Actually, we used a system you might be interested in. We used it to look for drug boats when no aircraft support was available.

We took a camera with a 360 degree control, mounted it underneath a weather balloon before inflating it with helium and using the cable as a "string". We could see for miles using the zoom on the camera.

I'm not saying to do it for surveillance purposes but I imagine 5 or 6 of the 12inch diameter balloons from the dollar store could get your antenna pretty high up there without all this fancy shmancy equipment.

Take that with a grain of salt and if your wife asks how you managed to run a wire over the trees to a power line 200 feet away and shock yourself, I know nothing.

That's not a terrible idea. Not sure how much you could lift as high as you need it, but when I was selling new homes, we had balloons we called "cloud busters" they were probably 3' across, and they'd lift that heavy streamer (think the stuff car lots use with the little triangle flags) a couple hundred feet up. I pulled it down at night, and put it in the model home garage. It would last about 3 weeks and didn't lose too much lift over that time.