A Saturday evening with not much to do. Checking the prediction, I realized that the probe was estimated to land about 2 km from our house. That sounded like an easy catch — the only downside was that this was to take place at around 3:00 AM.
An excellent opportunity to give the new LNA that I had purchased from www.wetterson.de and assembled, a shot.
I asked Felix if he wanted to join and he agreed excited. I set the alarm to 1:30 AM and Felix and I went to bed.
At 1:30 I checked the signal of the probe. It was still on its way up. So I tried to wake up Felix. I asked him if he still wanted to go out for the probe or sleep — he mumbled “probe”, stood up, went to the restroom, and then straight back to bed sleeping deeply a fraction of a second later. So I was on my own. Felix would certainly be disappointed the next morning.
Once the probe was on its way down, the prediction had shifted to Zuffenhausen. This is a 15 minutes drive or 10 km away. On the way to Zuffenhausen, it started to rain. The last telemetry I received in Zuffenhausen:
[ 9967] (N4230607) So 2018-05-20 01:05:17.001 lat: 48.82766 lon: 9.15580 alt: 385.58 vH: 1.7 D: 264.0° vV: -5.0 # [00000]
I had driven a little bit too far north, and I was about 3km away from the point of last telemetry, a park in Zuffenhausen. Nearing the park I received the signal of the now landed probe again.
[10366] (N4230607) So 2018-05-20 01:11:56.001 lat: 48.82770 lon: 9.15565 alt: 359.39 vH: 0.1 D: 168.4° vV: -0.0 # [00000]
By the time I had reached the park, it rained even stronger. I realized that the park is actually more a small forest. I left the car, but I could not convince myself to go up a muddy path into the dark forest getting soaked by the rain. I decided to go back, take a nap, and then try to recover the probe at daylight together with Felix. This turned out to be a good idea.
After Felix had learned that the probe was still waiting for him he stopped complaining, dressed up in no time, and we drove to the Stadtpark. To my surprise the probe was still transmitting 8 h 30 minutes after its power up and welcomed us with its typical metallic rasping sound. I have read some reports of a probe sending more than 9 hours — I however thought that this is more of an exception than a reproducible duration.
Minutes later, we found first the parachute hanging upside down in a tree and in the next tree the probe (The tether formed an “u”-letter that is turned upside-down). I reached up to the probe and cut it loose from its tether. The parachute was filled with water, so it started to slide down on the other side of the tether. With both, the probe and the parachute recovered, I removed the batteries. They were a little warm which is an indicator for a substantial current flowing. We then went back home for breakfast.
