[chbot] Sundays balloon-adventure, report please

[André Geldenhuis]

Partial success I'm afraid :P

The spot tracker stopped above 60k feet which we expected but I had hoped
it would start working once below that again.  It appears not for whatever
reason.     We also had a 10mW radio on board the balloon transmitting
location, altitude and temperature which the recovery team managed to track
all the way out to 80km with good decoding except when the balloon was low
on the horizon.  The last GPS fix was at 3436m at a composite position of
-44.04174, -173.04946.  The position is composite as the last two messages
only contained one of latitude and longitude due to signal breakup.   It
puts the payload out to sea south of akaroa harbour.


The balloon ascended much slower than anticipated and we are not sure why
yet, we are still going though the data to try and figure out what
happened.  The slow assent was the reason the balloon went out to sea, it
took much longer to reach its burst altitude.  Next time we will have cut
downs :P

We are hoping it washes up and someone finds it and returns it to us. The
electronics will be wreaked but the two camera SD cards and data logger SD
cards might still be ok and it would be nice to see the pictures :)

We got about 80% of the objectives for the flight though and we planned to
iterate all the electronics and replace the spot with a spot 2 which has a
ublox GPS unit so will work above 60k feet.   We will fly the next
iteration soonish.


I'll let the list know if we get any picures back

Cheers
Andre


On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 8:51 PM, Mark Atherton <markaren1 at xtra.co.nz> wrote:

> Hi Andre,
>
> Looks like it was a sucess, well done.
>
> From http://goo.gl/1o6o6 password microprize ...
>
> Launch time close to 10:42, with signal loss 12:51, so just over 2 hrs
> flight time (?)
>
> Not obvious what altitude you managed, or I haven't found the correct
> button yet.
>
> Any chance of a quick report here and maybe a fuller report with photos at
> the next Tait-meeting ?
>
> Regards,
>
> Mark
>
>
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