It is not as simple as it seems, let me give a few examples:

For these sorts of experiments, you absolutely must be able to find the payload after landing - and though you may be able to simulate roughly where it will land, you really have no idea. You have to have a really high confidence that your communication system is going to allow you to find the payload wherever it lands. In Australia, even the best two options (GSM and APRS) have rather patchy coverage. GSM is great near populated areas, but these are obviously not the best areas for launch and landing. Outside populated areas there is weak, or often no GSM reception at all. Likewise, most of the APRS infrastructure is located around areas where people live and are going to use it. Then of course there is the physical recovery, what happens if the balloon lands in the wilderness hundreds of kilometres from roads? What if it lands in the sea? Before you can really do anything fancy you really need to verify that you launch/recovery system works absolutely perfectly.

OK, so now you've got your GPS receiver and transmitters. How is your GPS location data affected by the transmitter going off next to it? How about serial comms? Could the NMEA data be corrupted when the transmitter goes off? I2C sensors? How will it affect communication with the SD-CARD? How will you know? How will the transmitter affect the rest of your system? How will the system be affected by low temperatures? What happens if one module fails, what will the system do to recover? It's good stuff for an engineering project, but perhaps not an extremely interesting story in itself.

You have many interesting ideas which really would make a project unique, in my case though it was enough of a handful already just getting the basics done myself while coping with the rest of Uni study/life. I'll try something more unique for my next launch.

When I say that I got University support, I meant that they were happy for me to do this as my final year project - they didn't fund me in any way and pretty much nobody (other than my supervisor) at Deakin would have known about the project until now.

In 3rd year before we start on our final year projects we have to give a presentation justifying what we are intending to do for our final year project. I put together a presentation talking about all the challenges involved and the successes that other groups have had, I guess my lecturer liked it and it went from there. The project was a pretty risky choice, I could have lost everything. Most other engineering students pick the pre-determined projects which are a lot safer. We are given freedom to do whatever project we want though, and for me this was a pretty good excuse to try a high altitude balloon launch which I'd wanted to do for years. Maybe the academics in your school/department are different, but I found mine to all be very helpful and supportive.

If you're still interested in doing a launch let me know, I live in Melbourne too and can probably help you out with equipment. I've got lots of manufacturer sample micros/sensors and other misc semiconductors that you could use. Let me know: gmmcc AT deakin DOT edu DOT au

I think that the reason that the newspapers printed this article was because it had a nice story to go with it. These high altitude balloon projects seem to be a bit of a hot topic at the moment. (I'm the Geoff from the Article)

Yes there have been many similar projects done by others for many years - I'm quite surprised that this story ended up going this far. Mine was a Uni project that I went about by myself, there aren't a lot of technical details in the article but the aim of the project from an engineering point of view was to build a data logging system that would function without fail at very low temperatures. Of course I wanted it to take nice pictures along the way, but this was really just because I thought it would be nice to have my own pictures from "Near Space". Other than the electronics/software design that went in to it, I put the system through low temperature environmental testing so that I could prove (mainly to myself) that the system would work before I launched it. I worked on it part time over a year, there was a lot that went in to it at the end.

I encourage others that are interested in this hobby to give it a try, it's a lot of fun and a lot more challenging than it seems. I gave it a go, learnt from it, and now plan another launch. I still haven't decided what to put in to the payload for next time round, so here's a question for the /. crowd:

What would you pack in a high altitude balloon project payload?