Awesome!

Wish I could be there, but at Atlantic beach now

So are we planning to open it tomorrow at Brixx's?

Send out a tweet when you get it with a picture - PLEASE?

Maybe I should call it the 'once-lost capsule', because it is Lost no more.

It didn’t go very far, did it? Only about 6.5 miles from launch, compared with our 42 mile flight later in the day. Yes, winds pick up once you move away from sunrise, but I don’t remember the chart showing the winds changing THAT much.

So, did our balloon fail at a pretty low altitude? For example, somewhere just over our 23,000 foot ping? Or, perhaps that 23,000 ping was on the way down? (Anybody have the lat/long of that ping?)

So, perhaps it didn’t make it that far. Or…..it is possible that it made it very high, where the winds were turning around and blowing out of the East, which would have pushed us back towards our launch. But….still seems like it would have gone further than just a few miles.

In the photo, notice how much of the balloon remains. These balloons are supposed to pop into shreds, so the balloon remnants don’t foul the parachute. This balloon has a lot of the material left. Maybe the balloons only ‘shatter’ in the very cold environments of the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, and this one never got up there, so when it popped it wasn’t cold enough to ‘shatter?’

Or, maybe the eBay balloon was bad.

I dunno!

And, why only three pings? We could still SEE the balloon, and had our radios in our hands, and we weren’t getting data.

Likely suspects:

1.) The antenna. Faulty? Not connected properly?

2.) Power: faulty batteries? Not connected properly?

3.) Transmit power: too low? Really, if we could see the capsule, even 250mw, with no obstructions, should have been enough to receive that thing.

I had flown that antenna before, and got I-gated perfectly. So, I don’t think the antenna is completely faulty. But, I did make that antenna at the last Hamfest. Maybe something was cut wrong. When I flew it with my APRS, I had power dialed to the multi-watt range, which is virtually screaming once you are up that high. And, I do pay for that by having shorter battery life. (On my last flight, the batteries failed after about 10 hours of flight, and I wasn’t igated the last bit of the journey. This made many observers think I had landed hours earlier than I actually did land.) So, the antenna is a reasonable culprit, and something we can now test.

System power? Not sure how we can test this. The batteries should all be dead by now…

Transmit power settings? Maybe worth seeing how far away we can receive, using the existing settings. Maybe worth dialing up into the watt range.

Jonathan