Balloon Found!

We got called from a guy named Russ who said he found our 'science experiment' up near Streator Il. We drove up Saturday morning and got it off his porch where he left it for us. Naturally it was pouring down rain when we got it. We had to pur water out of the box! The parachute was missing but that makes sense since he said he had to pull it down from the tree - the lines tore through to box.

We immediatlly tried to watch the video, but even though there was a file on the SD card, it was unreadable. The temperature data appeared for the most part ok however.

It looks like the antenna surrived intact with no damage the buzz module has some corrision around in the power inputs which would imply that it got wet while powered. This would explain the loss of signal. The other electronics (beacon, temp monitoring) all have some small corrision, but I think they might be salvagable.

When I tried the video camera at home it briefly worked, but then the lcd quit. It still has visible water behind the lcd screen.

Attemps to restore the video eventually succedded! We don't have sound, but the video is good. It shows the balloon at first rising rapidly. But then it hits the low cloud cover and takes alot of rain. The lens fogs up and gets somewhat hard to see, but you can make out that it can never punch through the heavy rain/cloud cover. It slowly drifts down and west, it hits the ground right where we received the last gps position. The video then cuts out. The impact with the ground must have moved the water around and finally shorted out both the camera and the gps beacon. It must have then lost enough weight and combinded with the rain stopping, lifted off again and made it all the way to its burst altitude and fallen near Streator.

So after all of this we learned an important leasson: Don't launch in the rain!

It looks like the water is both what caused the balloon to not rise properly but also shorted out the electronics.

On the plus side we do have some temperature data: The lowest external reading was -53F on the external probe, the lowest inside the box was 20F. Also it kept recording until 4:30am the next morning!

Ready for some testing

I've gotten the buzz module antenna in. I also finished all the soldering/connections for it and programmed the beacon.

I'm ready to do some testing. Specifically I want to see the max range we receive on the ground with the the aprs signal and how long it lasts. I would also like to see how far away I can locate the beacon via the yagi directional antenna.

I should be getting a short sma pigtail cable in the mail shortly, this will allow more flexible placement of the antenna in the payload container - less likely it will get broken during landing.

Still waiting on the camera accessories - SD card and external battery pack.

Weight allowing - we might also place a small 'hand warmer' inside the box to help keep things warm.

Parts, Parts, Parts

So far we have the following in:

Buzz module
Beacon
Gps
Camera
Parachute

I've confirmed the firmware on the GPS is sufficient to report above 60k feet. Also I've programmed the 'buzz' and beacon with the appropriate info (call signs and such). I've soldered on the connector to buzz. I still need to solder on the DB9 connector to the gps.

We are still waiting on a external battery pack for the camera, antenna for the gps beacon, and a 16GB SD card for the camera.

We can rebuild it...

We have already began buying the compontents for balloon flight #4 (this time with less fail!).

We have already ordered and a new gps, aprs beacon, parachute, video camera, and directional beacon.

This time we are thinking of putting a boost mobile cell phone along with instamapper software that will track the phone via its gps and log it on the web. This will provide a backup method of finding it.

Failure WAS an option...

Its all bad...

First the weather was not as well as was expected, however since the chance of rain was only 10% we proceeded. Also we changed our launch site at the last moment to move our expected landing site into a better location.

We started filling the balloon right away (first mistake). Then we plugged everything in and went to test from the car - and got no packets. Eventually we thought the anteanna was too close to the ground and held it up while testing. We received packets.

Right about then it started to rain.


We hurriedly packaged everythign back up only to realize we left the beacon module outside the box after we just taped it shut. In a rush to launch we taped it to the top of the box.

We then released the balloon and hurried to pack everything back in the car. Meanwhile I relized that the computer was not tracking the balloon, because I forgot to turn a crucial piece of the software on. I started tracking it at about 4000 feet up.

We started moving north east to get ahead of the expected path. The balloon was still headed south west. It was expected to do that until it reached 10k feet or so then head north east. It turned north east as expected and was looking good, if raising somewhat slowly. Then it started going down.

Since it was going down slow we knew the balloon had not burst. Either we underfilled or the rain/weather was making it come down (probably a combination of both). It continued to come down and started heading west (towards Peoria) At around 1000 feet it started up again then down after a few thousand feet of gaining elevation. At this point we just wanted it on the ground.

Then just about the worse thing that could happen happened - it headed towards the airport. It went right next to the airport at only a few thousand feet and then continued west slowly falling. We lost aprs signal at only 75 or so feet off the ground. This was more or less expected as we assumed it was on the ground and we lost signal due to terrain.

We eventually arrived near the apparent landing site and started picking up a strong beacon signal (no aprs data however). This was a good sign as it indicated the balloon was reasonbly close by. We had no luck locating it however. We drove around the area and eventually started using the directional antenna on the handheld radio to try and get a direction to the beacon. It first indicated West. After driving around more the signal was becoming fainter. We started to try and get a better direction with the handheld and now it was pointing north east. We drove a few miles in that direction and took another reading. Always a very faint signal north east.

Eventually we ran into Peoria and no longer could pick up the signal. The only thing I can think happened is that the balloon came down and for whatever reason the gps stopped working. Then it took off again and got sufficent altitude to start heading north east.

We never found it.

Last min stuff

Picked up the helium tank today.

We were talking about possibly moving the launch site. We will check the projected flight plan in the morning and if it is going to land in an undesirable location (i.e. Chicago area) there is no reason we can't move our launch site so that it will land further south.

We also have an additional 'payload' we are going to attach - a Flat Stanley that belongs to a friends nephew. We can attach it to the bottom of the payload and take some pictures of it on the way up.

All ready to go

So far everything looks good weather-wise.

The only unknown that could be a problem is the projected trajectory of the flight, we won't have an updated version of that until the morning.

I'll update info via twitter: http://twitter.com/linuxv

Realtime tracking can be seen here: http://aprs.fi/?call=kc9pum-11

Hoping to reach in excess of 100,000 feet and have High Def video during the entire flight, we also have a temperature monitor on board that will record both the temperature inside and outside the capsule every 5 seconds.