What is SatLink?
You build a probe. You hang it from a balloon. You release it at night and track it from the ground as it disappears among the stars. Every few seconds it talks to you over radio: where it is, how high, how it is doing inside. And you talk back.
That is SatLink: a balloon-mission challenge where each team designs, programs and flies its own radiosonde, connected over LoRaWAN to the infrastructure of the PiCARO project: gateways, network server and a log of every packet.
It is organized by the Instituto Tecnológico de Pabellón de Arteaga (ITPA), in Pabellón de Arteaga, Aguascalientes, Mexico. The balloons launch from its campus, home to two of the gateways that listen to them.
What it puts to the test
- Real connectivity. A radio link of tens of kilometers, with noise, distance and little margin. No simulators.
- Telemetry. Measuring, packing and transmitting useful data from an object that climbs and drifts away.
- Autonomy. A system that decides for itself when nobody can reach it anymore.
The 2026 goals
- LoRaWAN connection: join the network and transmit through it.
- Remote telemetry and commands: track the probe and send it orders beyond 15 km.
- Autonomy: the probe had to be able to release itself from the balloon.
What the teams achieved
On the night of October 28, 2026, two probes crossed the skies of Aguascalientes and Zacatecas, transmitting live:
- Orbitium (Sci-Fi) probe, from the Instituto Tecnológico de Pabellón de Arteaga (ITPA).
- TAES probe, from a team that brought together Instituto Tepeyac (high school) and the Universidad Politécnica de Aguascalientes (UPA).
| Goal | What was achieved |
|---|---|
| LoRaWAN connection | Both flew connected from start to finish. The network received 95.9% of Orbitium's flight packets and 94.3% of TAES's. |
| Remote telemetry | Orbitium's signal was received 31.6 km from campus and about 50 km from a gateway in Aguascalientes. TAES's, about 51 km away: the farthest of the night. |
| Remote commands | Orbitium answered 48 of 50 commands, with a median latency of 0.8 s, and replied to commands 20.4 km away. It was also released from the balloon by a command sent from the ground (CORT cutdown order), at 8,478 m altitude. |
| Autonomy | TAES released itself, with its own system's timed cutdown, at about 4.7 km altitude. |
Moments of the night
- 8,478 m. Orbitium flew the highest. At that altitude it received the cutdown command from the ground and separated from the balloon.
- A sky profile every 30 s. TAES sent 82 positions in flight: from them, that night's wind and temperature were rebuilt layer by layer.
- Found 32 km away. Orbitium came down in El Rascón, Zacatecas. Residents of the community found it the next day, 942 m from its last transmitted position.
Everything the network recorded that night is published, with its data and analysis, so anyone can study it and beat it.
Every edition raises the bar
SatLink does not start from scratch each year. A field-test campaign, from July to October 2026, prepared the gateways, the server and the telemetry. What was measured there and in the 2026 flights is the starting point for 2027: we now know how fast balloons really climb, what it takes to send commands without waiting, and how to reach farther.
The next record could be your team's.