Noah517:
Although you are right, sending a handheld up to 100 thousand feet is not the best method, it will work and to my knowledge, it seems to be more reliable.
Maybe, but handhelds are quite complex devices, with batteries that are not optimised for the cold with connectors and switches that can be affected by condensation as a balloon decends.
The LoRa module in the picture of the tracker I showed earlier does not have many parts and apart from the Arduino Pro Mini on the back of the board, there are only a couple of other components needed.
The tracker will run on 2 x AA Lithium Energizer batteries for several weeks, those batteries are good down to -40C, most batteries give up long before that.
LoRa is at its best at low data rates and its easy to send a binary location packet (10bytes of data) at a rate that will give a range of 3 times what I quoted earlier. When a balloon lands and you need to find it this extra range is a great help.
In one experiment I used a low cost radio controlled plane to take my LoRa relay to altitude and I was able to locate a LoRa tracker (balloon ?) on the ground over 12km away in an Urban area, effectivly searching an area of 500sqkm in 10 minutes.