We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it

UpLink weighed 491 grams: a 3D printed enclosure holding a LoRa image downlink and two independent trackers, sent up under a high altitude balloon. It reached the stratosphere and sent back hundreds of pictures on the way.

The write-up walks through the parts that are easy to underestimate, including insulation tests for the cold, squeezing images through a narrow radio link, the electronics, and launch day itself. A separate section collects the ideas that were dropped along the way. The last section is the search: the team drove across Montana after the payload and came home without it.