The prediction put the landing location near Crailsheim. As I would be on my way to my parents’ place anyways and pass by Crailsheim, why not arranging the timing to be at the right place at the right time?

I already picked up the probe when leaving Stuttgart. Near Autobahn Intersection Weinsburg, the signal became so strong, that the decoder could disassemble a couple of packages with the antenna lying on the dashboard (i.e. without directing  the antenna into the direction of the probe).

Eventually, the balloon would burst. Near Kochertalbrücke, I found a resting area, where I tracked the probe until landing. I suddenly noticed that the power converter no longer produced electricity which would make the computer and therewith the reception and subsequent decoding of probe telemetry stop pretty soon. Fiddling around the the converter, I realized that the fuse of the socket must have blown. I connected the converter to the socket of the cigarette lighter, and from the high chirping noise of the converter I could hear that I was back in business.

I received the last package:

[ 8463] (M3853109) (2017-12-24) So 13:09:41.620 lat: 49.27513 lon: 9.66126 alt: 523.3 (d:14.8) vH: 5.2 D: 74.5° vV: -4.5 DOP[2,6,9,23,5,7,30,16,29,13] 1.7

So the probe was near Künzelsau. I switch from map mode to satellite mode, and I realized that it would be difficult to get the probe — the GPS coordinates indicated that the probe would most likely have landed in the forest.

 

 

I drove to Künzelsau and received the probe when I turned into the street between school and forest in the picture above. I parked, got on my boots, took the directional antenna and the radio, and started looking. About 15 minutes later, I had located the probe. The probe dangled from a tree about 5 meters above the ground. Using a long branch, I tried to tear it down to no avail. Without appropriate tools (like a quadrocopter to attach a hook with a rope or a chain saw to cut the tree :-)), and no good ideas, I left and went to my parents’ place to celebrate Christmas.

Before I left, I arranged some marks on the ground and took fotos to be able to trace back to the site  — just in case I  developped an idea on how to recover the probe with reasonable effort.

 2017-12-26: The Recovery

Going back to Stuttgart, I would pass by Künzelsau again. As the probe was hanging high above the ground in the forest, it was unlikely that somebody would have recovered in the meanwhile. In the basement of my parents place, I found some wooden rods and a hook which I assembled to an expendable bar  of 3,90 meters length. Being 1,95 m and being able to reach out about another 40 cm, I would be able to catch the probe up to a height of about 6,20 meters. Checking the images I had taken, I estimated that the probe was hanging not 5 meters but 6 meters meters above the ground. As there are always 10 cm missing, I brought another rod and some wire to extend the bar — just in case 🙂 My mother found the idea of  the little trip so appealing that she spontaneously decided to come along.

 

 

Having arrived I tried to reach out to the probe. Of course, there were 10 cm missing, so extended the bar with another wooden rod and fastened it with wire. The hook hitched in, and I pulled down the probe until the rope ripped. There it was — we finally recovered it.

 

 

 

 

With the probe recovered, I went to Crailsheim to drop my mother at the train station, and went on into the opposite direction to Stuttgart to celebrate Christmas with Felix and Gisela a second time.