Benno
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Firstly Joe can I congratulate you and your team on a mission well done!!!! the video looks absolutely amazing!!!!! I can not believe that I had not seen or heard of your mission.
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Precisely why I suggested you have a good hard think about whether you want to put so much effort into this project. We didn't get much media coverage nor did we try to play the media because we were working in very remote areas - sat phones only and everyone involved was working hard towards the launch. In such a remote area, we couldn't work with the news cycle anyway.
We were not concerned with coverage in the fickle media cycle or using the social media wave which is very short lived and for us, of little consequence. For your project, this coverage is probably far more important. Catalin and I were interested in longer term aspects and with people with a longer attention span - amateur astronomers and eclipse enthusiasts. The details on my web site are deliberately scant because we are entering the final stages of editing of a large feature article that will be published in the November issue of Sky and Telescope. November issue gets printed in 4 weeks time so we really are close.
You probably need to engage a skilled PR person and conduct your flight in an easily accessible location - but away from airports and flight paths otherwise CASA clearances become more difficult. Maybe get morning tv on board?
The camera belongs to Catalin. I can't remember the specific model but it's one of the small GoPro type HD cameras. The youtube video is lower res but the raw footage seen on a big screen tv is fantastic to watch.
It was a 1500g balloon with a 1500g payload. Original plan was to fill it to 2m diam at launch 4.2 cubic m of Helium.
Burst diameter at 35km is 9.45m
Ascent rate 5.51m/s
Time to burst 100 minutes.
In the end, the helium cylinder we bought wasn't full to spec and didn't have enough helium so we filled it less and removed some of the science pack to reduce weight.
Ascent rate is far less important to you. For us, we had extra constrains that we had to get the balloon up in a relatively short time. It was critical that we not have it burst before the eclipse nor drift out of the path of totality or out to sea. Not too fast, not too slow. Therefore the freeweight calculations were made on site when the balloon was full. The freeweight determines the ascent rate. You might want to make it slower to string out the event.
We used a MicroTrack from Byonics, 144,850 Mhz
configurable (+/- 0,5 Mhz), we also had a Bionics GPS module.
We tracked the device with the APRS system with assistance from Cairns amateur radio operators in the 144,80 or 144,85 band with recording data (in APRS).
We didn't need to use off the shelf trackers like the link you posted from High altitude science. We had people on the team who put the tracker together from smaller component pieces.
Joe