The weather has been windy and raining for over a week, and the forecast was calling for unstable weather for almost another week. It wasn't looking good to get in a launch this weekend, but Joel's kids really wanted to see a launch, and for everyone to be able to attend we had to do it on a weekend. John and I looked at the weather Saturday night, it was looking like there might be enough of a break in the weather Sunday morning to attempt the launch. So I told John to go ahead and come in then next morning if it looked OK, then I gave Joel a call.
I had a little work to do before the launch. I had purchased a new solenoid for the shutter release on the digital still camera, and I really wanted that set up for this launch. The old solenoid I had been using only just had enough power to trigger the shutter, and was missing a picture now and again. So I fabricated a new bracket to hold the solenoid, then bench tested the trigger mechanism. Then another problem showed up, the old problem on the Aiptek camera of the battery losing contact if it gets jarred. Once the camera shuts down, it's done taking pictures until you power it back on again. This new solenoid was hitting the trigger with such force, it shut the camera down every time it tried to take a picture.
So I decided I had to solder wire leads from the camera to a battery pack. But that was going to solve another problem I had, I didn't have any more fresh AA lithium batteries. But I did have those 3.6 volt 8.5 amp hour lithium batteries. So I soldered leads from the camera battery terminals directly to the big lithium battery. All problems solved, now the camera clicked away every 25 seconds taking pictures just like it should.
Sunday morning dawned windy and mostly cloudy. At about 7:30 in the morning I decided to call off the flight, and I tried calling Joel to tell him not to come in. But he had already left home. The wind was the main concern, but when Joel arrived I didn't have the heart to cancel the launch. So we decided to fill the balloon inside my big building, then take it out to launch. As fate would have it, by the time we had the balloon ready to launch, the skies had cleared to partly cloudy and by filling the balloon inside it all went fairly smoothly.
I used a gallon milk jug filled with water to determine the exact lift I wanted. As soon as the jug lifted off the ground, we stopped filling. That does seem to be an easier way to determine the desired nozzle lift than using a scale. We walked the filled balloon out the big door into the open, and let her go. There was some concern the payload was going to hit a tree, the lower lift and brisk wind was just about enough to cause it to catch the tree, but it cleared and quickly headed South.
We all piled into my Blazer, we had a full load. Joel and his girlfriend Michelle were in front. John and I in the back seat with Joel's son Reed between us with the computer and Joel's daughter Morgan in the back. The balloon made a track pretty much due South. We had little trouble keeping up with, but it was moving a pretty good clip that kept us at the speed limit most of the time. Everything was going well, I did a quick calculation of ascent rate at one point and it was just under 1,000' per minute. Once the balloon reached about 50,000' it started meandering in the same location, so will pulled off on a gravel road and watched the data come in. We passed 65,000', so we had beat the altitude of the first flight, then we passed 76,000', the second balloons peak altitude. So we once again had reached near space and still ascending! We watched the data closely as we passed 80,000'... Then the altitude started dropping, the balloon had burst at just over 80,000'.
We watched the data as the payload reported some 78,000' with the balloon heading more or less due West, then the data stopped coming in. The computer software simply read, "Unavailable". If we had lost the radio signal, it simply would have read "No Data". I had never seen an "unavailable" before. We waited a minute in silence, hoping it was some sort of momentary glitch. But nothing changed. The odd thing was that the ground track was still reporting data. At first I thought we had just lost GPS 3D ability, and we could still track it's ground location. But it was soon apparent something was terribly wrong. The ground track was indicating an absolute straight path to the West, and it was moving at about 70 mph. I knew the wind direction, and there's no way it would be moving to the West.
In desperation I shut down the computer and rebooted it, hoping it was perhaps a software problem. But as soon as the program was running it reported the exact same flight path and "unavailable" in the lock window. But what I did still have was a radio signal. It appeared the GPS was malfunctioning, but the MaxStream radio modem was working fine. Joel wanted to go West, but I knew better. So I plotted out where I expected the landing location to be and we headed in that direction, South Southeast. Then we lost the radio signal, and the computer now reported "No Data". Things were looking pretty gloomy at that point, with no GPS data any where near the landing site, this would be the proverbial needle in the haystack.
The one hope I held out was that if we could get close enough. We could pick up the radio modem signal again, and use that as a crude radio direction finding system. IF, we reacquired the radio modem signal, and spent many hours driving around, we MIGHT be able to get close enough for the small homing beacon to be used. But I knew the odds were against us. Using my best dead reckoning, I sent Joel on a course that would lead us around where I thought it should have landed. Providing the payload landed on higher ground, we should get at least 3 miles range.
After about 15 minutes, all the sudden Reed chirps up, "I've got a signal!". Low and behold not only did we have a signal, we had real GPS data coming in! I must now confess I made a mistake before this flight, I didn't program in a new map of the area. I knew this flight would go South, but I forgot to include a map that covered that area. So while we had a GPS fix, we didn't have a map location. So I programmed the longitude and latitude in Johns hand held GPS and set it to navigate to those coordinates. We were about 3 miles out, and within a few minutes Joel spotted the payload in a field. The small homing beacon receiver confirmed it was our payload. Whoooh! A big sigh of relief!
Joel, Reed and I headed out to recover the payload. Reed was the first one to the payload and noticed one corner of the Styrofoam cooler had broken on impact, and the camera lens cover had popped off. We opened up the payload, and everything seemed fine, the camera lens just snapped back on too. This was the smallest chute I'd used, and perhaps I need to go back to a slightly larger chute. But then again, a $4 cooler isn't a big deal, and it actually did it's job by breaking and protecting the payload inside.
Click Here for a video of the days events and Reed's overview commentary of the day. 22 MB for about 4.5 minutes.
This is the flight path as captured on Google Earth.
Here is the HAB3 kml file for use in Google Earth.
Here is the HAB3 flight file in gpx format.
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