[HSIS] Fwd: WB8ELK ozonesonde hitchhiker flight results

[Jeff Cotten]

cool!  did you guys get to try out the chirped tracking method as well?

what kind of cat was in the cathouse? :)


On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Ethan Chew <spacefelix at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> ---------- 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
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> HSIS mailing list
> HSIS at lists.makerslocal.org
> http://lists.makerslocal.org/mailman/listinfo/hsis
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.makerslocal.org/pipermail/hsis/attachments/20100614/bee6c2bf/attachment.htm>