We would like to acknowledge and endorse the following companies who provided the specialized equipment we used for the Husker-game HAB launch.
StratoStar
For the last three years, StratoStar and Jason Kreuger (President) have been an immeasurable help with the development of the ballooning programs for NASA Nebraska Space Grant and the Strategic Air and Space Museum. Without his assistance, as well as the high-quality, high-reliability HAB equipment StratoStar produces, we quite literally would not have gotten off the ground. Our primary experiment balloon for the Husker game launch and chase used the entire StratoSAT Elite Package.
Byonics
Primary and back-up tracking for the 2nd balloon, and back-up tracking for the 1st balloon use two Byonics Micro-Trak AIO’s, and one Micro-Trak RTG. Both were the “HA” variants.
Spherachutes
Both balloons used 60” Heavy Duty Spherachutes with Weather Balloon Attachments. Spherachutes allows you to choose your own custom color panels. Great for matching school-colors, or making high-visibility chutes. All ten experiment pods on our two Husker game balloons used Spherachutes’ fantastic Fabric Box Wraps (and 11x9x7.25 coolers from ULINE).
Project Aether
Project Aether has an nice assortment of high altitude ballooning equipment and is well worth your consideration. We used the 1200 gram Pawan Rubber Products Meteorological Balloons Project Aether sells for the our Husker-game launch.
Other vital equipment
Besides the aforementioned pieces of equipment, we also used an AvMap Geosat 6 APRS navigator matched with a Kenwood TH-72A in each of our chase vehicles. Each balloon also had a SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger as a back-up for our secondary tracking system (i.e. a back-up for the back-up.) Lastly, we outfitted the balloons with 5 GoPro HD Hero 2 Cameras recording both HD video and taking still images.