Research

Paper

TESTING February 26, 2026

CubeSounder: Low SWaP-C 180 GHz Radiometer for Atmospheric Sensing Tested on High Altitude Balloons

Authors

Kyle D. Massingill, Tyler M. Karasinski, Sean Bryan, Michael Baricuatro, Daniel Bliss, Delondrae Carter, Walter Goodwin, Jonathan Greenfield, Christopher Groppi, Jae Joiner, Philip Mauskopf, Philip Rybak, Scott Smas, Roshni Suresh, Joesph Tinlin, Bianca Wullen, Peter Wullen

Abstract

Microwave sounding is the leading driver of global numerical weather forecasting, but is limited by the scalability of such instruments. With modern machining and commercial microwave components, it is now possible to design low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) microwave spectrometers while maintaining wide bandwidth performance. Here we report on the status of CubeSounder, a spectrometer tailored for water vapor radiometry that utilizes passive wave guide filter banks. After developing a prototype and high altitude balloon payload, we demonstrated CubeSounder on commercial stratospheric balloon flights. We report on our design process, especially the simulation and fabrication of the custom millimeter-wave filter banks. We also report the initial results of the data collected from the balloon flights.

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2602.23338
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: eess.SP
Published: 2026-02-26
Fetched: 2026-02-27 04:35

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Raw Data (Debug)
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