[LeArc] WB8ELK Indiana Workshop payload recovered near Lexington KY

Mon Mar 3 13:12:06 EST 2008

Here is a report from Bill Brown on the balloon launch from Columbus, IN

From: "wb8elk at aol.com" <wb8elk at aol.com> 

Subject: [GPSL] WB8ELK Indiana Workshop payload recovered near Lexington KY 

I arrived at the landing site after midnight.... as I approached the exit just north of Lexington KY, I could hear my voice beacon and could talk through the simplex repeater even though they were almost 2 miles away and as it turned out were all lying on the ground....(I had reports of stations in MI, IL, IN, OH and possibly IA and GA all working through the simplex voice repeater.) 

Landing position: 38d 07.04m   84d 28.79m 

Dr. Robert Downing of Lexington was kind enough to let me drive in at midnight to retrieve the payloads from his property. 

I drove right up to a large metal garage and found the payloads and parachute lying right next to the garage building along a narrow 4-foot wide walkway very near where the FindMeSpot satellite GPS tracker was indicating.. ..just over the fence to the right of the walkway was a field of knee-deep mud. I suspect that it may have landed on the roof of the garage and slid down onto the walkway. 

The FindMeSpot payload was actually upside down and it's amazing it was able to send its position up to the satellite at all. 

The cameras were all intact and all but one still camera took some great images...I'm still reviewing them all. The video cameras (RCA Small Wonder) apparently have an undocumented 60 minute max record time, even if the total memory available is 120 minutes....so we have great videos of the launch from various payload perspectives but the videos stop at around 48,000 feet during the ascent stage....we do have some great photos of the parachute descent from various perspectives and a couple of photos just a few hundred feet away from landing. We flew 4 Canons and 3 RCA video cameras looking up, down and at the horizon. 

We were flying the Canon 7.1 megapixel A560 and A570 series digital still cameras with the CHDK intervalometer microBasic mod that was mentioned by Mark Conner a few weeks back. It works great and you can easily make the camera do all kinds of things with a few custom microBasic commands. 

I found out why the WB8ELK-11 APRS tracker failed just after burst....I was testing out the lightweight Byonics SMA wire antenna and it was neatly snapped right off at the connector... .so next time we will attach the antenna to a support rod.....it was actually still transmitting it's position when I got close enough to hear it without it's antenna. The second tracker (WB8ELK-12) failed at liftoff. 

The FindMeSpot GlobalStar tracker worked great and as suspected stopped reporting above 60k feet, BUT came back to life again on descent and really saved the mission since it sent us the actual landing site within 10 minutes after touchdown. I'll post more on these results soon. It reports every 10 minutes directly to the GlobalStar satellite network and shows up on a website....lat/ lon but no altitude info. Their statement that it wouldn't work above 27,000 feet was unfounded as we had accurate reports right up to 60k feet both ascending and descending. This is a great alternative to APRS for final landing site location since it will report its position even when way outside the range of digipeater coverage. 

I will be posting some select photos and maps of the flight path and landing site to my website later tonight. 

- Bill 

I arrived at the landing site after midnight.... as I approached the exit just north of Lexington KY, I could hear my voice beacon and could talk through the simplex repeater even though they were almost 2 miles away and as it turned out were all lying on the ground....(I had reports of stations in MI, IL, IN, OH and possibly IA and GA all working through the simplex voice repeater.) 

Landing position: 38d 07.04m   84d 28.79m 