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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <wb8elk at aol.com>
Date: Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 2:30 AM
Subject: WB8ELK ozonesonde hitchhiker flight results
To: balloonatics at yahoogroups.com, BarryL at hiwaay.net,
shane.wilson at mindspring.com, garydion at gmail.com, kg4wsv at gmail.com,
jdw at eng.uah.edu, wb4vhf at yahoo.com, rwilson at hiwaay.net, w4htb at insightbb.com,
spacefelix at gmail.com, gmmann55 at yahoo.com, ka9szx at gmail.com, dbowen1 at mac.com,
n9qgs at me.com



I flew a low-power (10 milliwatt) version of my multi-mode tracker on 144.34
MHz running DominoEX22 and 300 baud ASCII RTTY.....total payload weight of
4.5 ounces. In addition we flew a small camera payload for the local Makers
Local 256 club all attached to the weekly ozonesonde from the NSSTC building
near UAH-Huntsville

Shane N4XWC, Barry N4MSJ, members of the Makers Local 256 club and I set out
to chase....we could see the balloon visually during a good deal of the
flight since it wasn't traveling very fast and we could keep close to it
during the flight.

It burst around 101,000 feet and only landed a mile southwest of the burst
point right in downtown Decatur, AL. It was about a mile NW of Point Mallard
park and a half mile south of the TN River.  Donna Avenue just north of
Harrison St.

Although weak and being directly under the balloon in the cone of silence
for a vertical antenna, we still had enough signal to get most of the
DominoEX signal to keep track of the balloon position. My home station was
decoding the 300 baud ASCII RTTY signal and uploading that info to the
http://spacenear.us/tracker website which plotted to a Google Map.

I lost half my antenna at burst but still could copy a few weak position
reports a couple of minutes before landing which helped narrow the search
zone on the east side of Decatur. When we were about a half mile away, Barry
N4MSJ was able to DF the ozonesonde signal which allowed us to get close
enough to copy the DominoEX signal on 2m to decode the final lat/lon
position.

It turned out that the payloads had dropped into a woman's backyard off of
Donna Avenue right next to her cathouse. She has a large outbuilding and
fence covering about a good portion of her yard as a cat sanctuary for two
wild cats that she didn't want roaming the neighborhood after she moved to
the city from the country. Her cat "Tom" seemed particularly interested in
the buzzing ozonesonde sitting right next to his fenced in
sanctuary.....photo of the landing site (myself and the Makers 256 team
holding the payloads). The Makers 256 club is participating in a competition
called Hacker Spaces in Space to take photos in Near Space as economically
as possible.

You meet some interesting people when you drop things on them from 20 miles
up.

- Bill WB8ELK

PS...landing site coordinate:  34d 35.18m, -086d 57.45m

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