http://alg.umbc.edu/umap/radiosonde/index.html


A friend sent these pictures of a weather balloon which came down on their farm, there's a note saying it is no longer required.

I was surprised how they now seem more sophisticated than the one I found in the 1980s.
There's a lot of electronic components to throw away after one use.

I guess in the satellite age they don't launch as many as they used to.

From Wikipedia:

Noaa:

Must be a use somewhere...

Amazing to think that reached the edge of the atmosphere before coming back down to Earth. I'm sure that could be jury-rigged into a weather station given enough knowledge on electronics.
  I guess what with technology becoming smaller, lighter and cheaper, they can be more "throwaway".

If manufactured in volume, a relatively simply PCB like that may only cost a few quid to make. Hell, think of the complexity of some consumer gear and that that is no longer viable to repair.
It may be possible to make it do something useful, but you would need to know what protocols it uses to transmit - and you would obviously need to rig up some type of receiver to decode it all. Bit of an "art for art sakes" project really I would have thought.