No, not impressive. The club is a radio hobby club and the balloon is a radio beacon balloon, which transmits its location and height unencrypted on an open frequency, as do basically all balloons. Except for those from china, apparently.

If they really shot down that balloon, and not a Chinese one, they used a 500,000 rocket started by a 200mm plane to kill a $100 balloon. Spending so much on so little on the other hand is impressive.

> which transmits its location and height unencrypted on an open frequency

Usually once every hour or every other hour for a quick second long burst, otherwise they are powered down and just floating. Pico balloons can't carry more than a few grams and depend on solar panels to charge up a battery enough to transmit.

Also air to air missiles are not magic. They don't have secret decoders for every imaginable protocol to lock on to targets (and assume they aren't lying about their location). They are either slaved from the planes radar, contain their own radar, or use heat signatures to lock on.

Your overall point stands, but I can see where the original poster seems to be coming from. There are "anti-radiation missiles", which lock into transmitters to blow them up.

IE: The AGM 88 "HARM" missile does this. But these are not used by air-superiority fighters like F22, but instead by "Wild Weasel" fighter jets against ground RADAR targets.

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I think the poster you responded to magically assumed that a AGM-88 would work against a balloon. But that is mistaken: the balloon isn't transmitting enough of a RADAR signature for something like HARM to lock into it.

Sure there's a radio signal, but Sidewinders are heat seekers. While I can believe one went for the electronics package on the Chinese balloon these pico balloons shouldn't have anything more than a bit of solar heating.

Detecting them is probably easy--note the balloon material appears shiny. Probably aluminized mylar, it will show up on radar.

Of course the rockets are heat seeking. But someone has to give the order. They have sensors, they investigate. They report up the chain of command. I don't even want to know how many people were involved from the moment it was detected to the moment the order was given. 100? 1000? More? And no one bothered. And the US weather service alone starts around 60,000 to 100,000 balloons a year.

It doesn't matter how you FIND an object if you can't target it. That's why articles crying that china can track the F22 and F35 are meaningless, because knowing something is in your sky and being able to direct a munition into it are very different things. Pilots who have practiced dogfighting the F35 have expressed surprise at just how close you can be and still be unable to get a good enough radar return from the targeting beam to actually shoot at it.

Those cost differences are striking. An adversary could launch thousands very cheaply. I wonder how militaries would react to so many potential targets.

In the worst case, you would react by directly attacking the adversary that launched them. Hopefully by the time things had reached that level you would have had an opportunity to exhaust all diplomatic channels and could have found a more peaceful resolution.

With technical escalation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon

Perhaps not so well when everyone's a Captain Kirk.

Investment would lean back towards gun based AA, like anti-air artillery since the objects are so high. Investments are already going back into that direction as cheap drones like the SHAHED are easily managed affordably by systems like Gepard. It's actually quite fun to see these systems revived.

I think laser-based weapons would be more likely, honestly. It should be possible to heat up a balloon enough to melt the envelope without an absurd power supply.

The dollar sign has never gone behind the amount. Why can't these last two generations place the dollar sign in the correct place?

$100. Not 100$.

It's entirely possible they aren't American. Remember, the internet is global.

In the 90s and early 2000s, people, even from other countries, typed it correctly on the internet. I have the EFnet IRC logs right now on my hard drive if you need proof. Hell I'm tempted to make a youtube video just to prove my point.

Here's a foreigner who made the mistake in the 1930's: https://www.britannica.com/event/Lindbergh-baby-kidnapping#/...

I'm amused how mad you got about this. I wish my life was that luxurious that all I can be enraged about is where people put their dollar sign.

Yes, nothing convinces people like an angry YouTube rant about how "kids these days" don't appreciate the bad old days of the internet.

There are folks from all around the world online, and many countries place their currency symbol after the amount.

But the post in question was giving an amount in US dollars, and the US isn't such a country.

Habits die hard.

Like thinking people in other countries are kids in your own country.

In English that's correct but this is a common mistake for ESL people.

Hmm, I'm a grammar pedant and that one has never bothered me except in formal prose (real journalism, marketing copy, books).

It's spoken that way ("one-hundred dollars") so it's actually kind of intuitive to write it that way, even if it's technically 'wrong.'

Oh really? Then why don't we say QUESTION MARK or PERIOD verbally for each sentence of you think the $ literally means "dollars?"

because we have other clues for that. A question is denoted by a raise in tone at the end of the sentence. A period is denoted by a pause.

Probably people from other countries where currency typically goes behind the number like 100€.

And yet you still understood what they were saying. It's not that serious.

As a taxpayer, I think the AF using a $100 (or was it $12) balloon for target practice is way better than say the $570K BQM-167 remote drone that they'd normally use!

https://dronedj.com/2021/03/24/the-air-forces-training-drone...

And they usually have radar reflectors on them also.

Such as - https://www.overlookhorizon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/5...

Missiles are not designed to lock onto voluntary transponders, for hopefully obvious reasons, meaning the AIM-9x in this instance has demonstrated either a very sensitive IR sensor, or a very sensitive radar setup.

I didn't say it was a good use of resources.

When you think about it, not really. The F22 went into service 15 years ago and has a radar cross section about the size of a honey bee. I would hope that our air defenses would be designed to detect aircraft like that, and I would also imagine a balloon with no thought to stealth would show up really nicely on any radar that didn't filter it out.

As for the heat signature, and I admit I'm doing more guesswork here, it works via IR contrast. As long as the balloon was sufficiently warmer than the air around it, and you were close enough, it should track just fine.

For NORAD and other air defense platforms, they're a ton of filtering that must be done to ignore cruft, otherwise they'd be responding to floating plastic bags, birds, etc, constantly.

From the missile system and fighter radar perspective, that's not something they heavily (if at all) test these platforms against, because that's not a threat there's any expectation to face.

I think it's hilarious that our defense tracking infrastructure is too good at seeing stuff and that causes problems.

only took a couple of tries

Isn't each missile $400k?

Each missile purchased puts food on the table for a defense contractor living in Chantilly, VA. (The military industrial complex welfare state is very lucrative as long as you keep your mouth shut, your head down, and obey)

No wonder they blamed F-35 programme as the main reason why American roads aren't fixed.

Which is always a stupid take. America is absurdly wealthy. We could burn half a trillion dollars a year in a big bonfire and still easily afford all the niceties of a modern nation like good infrastructure and healthcare.

We might have to actually tax a proportional amount from ultrarich and megacorps, but I'm perfectly fine with the people receiving 70% of all increase in wealth since the 50s paying a significant amount of tax.

That was a different UFO, the one over Lake Huron. This one was over Canada.