What is shorter hops in this sense to you? If you make some sort of weather balloon where the balloon never bursts, yes, they will travel very far. If you use a cheaper balloon that does burst, they don't travel down range very far in comparison. As I posted previously, depending on the balloon/parachute/payload, our little "experiment" went just over 100+ miles. That seems fairly acceptable. You could start 50 miles away from the border, and the recovery team would also be 50 miles away from the border. That's a pretty good buffer from any security teams working border crossings.