The prediction suggested a landing site of the probe near Heilbronn — which would made it a 50 km drive to the north of Stuttgart. Gisela and Felix chose to come along, so we jumped in the car and went north. Since the balloon often burst prematurely, I decided to add some safety margin and to go towards Hockenheim which is a bit further west.
So far, we had only used the web to get an update on the probe. So shortly before Hockenheim, I pulled over to an service area to get my software receiver and decoder working. Once I had it up and running, we realized that the balloon had burst prematurely. The probe was now in 21000m altitude. The new prediction put the landing zone near Speyer. So we were really close. We used the time of the remaining flight of the probe to make it closer to Speyer. In the vicinity of Speyer, we started tracking the probe to the ground. We received the last telemetry package in 206 meters altitude which makes it less than 100 m above the ground. And we were 17 km away from the position of the last telemetry package. Perfect.
[ 9322] (M1453176) (2018-01-14) So 13:10:07.520 lat: 49.34076 lon: 8.38891 alt: 206.9 (d:3.6) vH: 5.3 D: 330.6° vV: -4.9 DOP[2,5,9,7,21,15,30,8,13,28,20] 1.4
We went to the landing site, a forest area — not so good as it would probably be difficult to recover the probe.When we arrived we heard the probe. I could even decode packages. So probe could not be far. Unfortunately, I had not taken the time, to check the terrain via google maps earlier – now my internet reception was bad, and I did not have a full understanding of the terrain and the location of the probe. I hence relied on the radio and the antenna for direction finding.
We went into the underwood which made our progress slow. We looked around. The signal became stronger, but no probe. Suddenly, the signal vanished. The probe had been running at most 3,5 hours at that point in time — so this could only mean one thing: Somebody else had found it and removed the batteries.
At home, I did my post flight analysis. We were close, but we had turned too early into the forest. I had rushed it too much and had not gotten a clear picture about the terrain. Well Felix, will try again, and hopefully next time you will get your probe.
