Month: June 2018

Stuttgart launched an unscheduled evening probe at 18:45 h CEST. Felix and myself tracked the probe, and started to drive to the assumed landing zone on Killesberg (Hill in Stuttgart) once the probe was nearing the ground. Having arrived, we received no signal. We drove around listening. When we entered the street “Am Bismarkturm”, we suddenly heard the probe. It was only receivable in an area of about 30  radius  around our location and  too weak for decoding.  The direction of the antenna pointed downhill towards Feuerbach-Tal-Strasse. I tried to move closer along bearing line thereby loosing the signal. On a street further downhill, we received it again. Also here, we could only receive the signal very locally. I stopped and tried to get a better signal by training the directional antenna into the direction of the strongest signal. We received 2  incomplete telemetry packages — but one contained the GPS fix of the probe:

[15218] (P0630343) # [01010]
lat: 48.80068 lon: 9.15583 alt: 346.55 vH: 0.1 D: 225.9° vV: 0.1 # [11010]

GoogleMaps suggested that the probe had landed on top of a house. We went near the GPS position, and received a strong signal. It was dark, heavily raining,  and the path to the probe looked like a dirt road. I decided to head back for home and try to recover the probe in day light.

 

2 days later I came back. The battery was empty by now of course. Walking along the road, I realized that this was not an area of permanently inhabited houses but small patches of land with garden plots. I found  the parachute hanging on a shed. The probe itself was hanging in tree above a neighboring hut.

 

The owners of the properties were kind enough to help me recover the probe (They were also happy about some unusual happenings) . Interestingly, they had seen the parachute, and as they did not know what it was, they had just overlooked it.

 

 

Even though the probe had landed in a tree top,  Felix and I  had received it very weakly from less than 1 kilometer away 2 days earlier.  Looking at the topography this was easy explainable: The garden plots are situated on the foot of a cliff. When we tried to locate the probe from the hill top above, we had no direct  line of sight as the probe was hanging on the far side shielded by the cliff.