Airforce vs ham radio, paranoia of spy balloons

[gnuuser]

It's understandable that there is a lot of paranoia in our military worlds, but it can be taken to extremes.
Balloon based telemetry has been used by amateur radio, weather services, education, the military, and environmental services for a long time.
As far as amateur radio is concerned our frequency bands are well known.
The transmitters used range about the size of a half dollar , and some of them may be equipped with small solar panels for long term tracking.
They usually transmit a callsign and time ( amateur radio)
Temperature, barometric pressure, geolocation, altitude ( weather)
All in all they are not very large or particularly expensive.
So any payload considerably larger than cigar box!
Is most likely to be doing far more than just telemetry functions.

Questions to consider!
Do military aircraft contain hf scanning equipment?
Are the crew trained to recognize the transmission?
Or is it just the fun of destroying a 12 to 50 dollar rig with a half million dollar missile?

None of our transmissions are encrypted ( with exception of rc craft) because it violates fcc rules and we could lose our license.
We also have to register launches.

Someone is seriously dropping the ball here, (and those people are running the country )

[R_Head]

The whole thing was a distraction. Looks like it was taken from "99 Luftballons"

[gnuuser]

Would be amusing to release an arseload of mylar helium balloons with tinfoil tied to them.
It would make radar go nuts.

[R_Head]

99 Luftballons