A beautiful day. The sun came back after the winter onset during the last 2 weeks. Blue skies and almost no clouds. And still inversion with the probe landing near Stuttgart. The prediction suggested Böbling as landing zone.
The timing worked well today. Even though I got caught up in a traffic jam in Stuttgart, I was in the predicted landing area in time. Prediction updates based on the current trajectory placed the landing zone near Aidlingen which is just a couple of villages down the road from Böblingen.
Having arrived in Aidlingen, I stopped to ready my gear. I could receive the probe, but decoding did not work. Also my hand held radio received the probe loud and clear. I decided to continue solely by using the web and try to not loose the contact. I passed through Aidlingen and then turned South towards Gärtringen.
I arrived at the landing zone with the radio always receiving the probe. By now, it must have been already on the ground and could not be far.
I gave the decoding another shot to no avail. I then parked the car and went ahead with the directional antenna to locate the probe. The signal seemed to be strongest from the east from a patch of forest. It was however not really conclusive. So I first went down South hoping to get a clearer fix. I then saw something that might have been a balloon in a field — but it turned out to be a plastic bag. I went back North-East towards the forest. The signal became stronger. Slowly I progressed through the underwood. By now I had reached an opening and the signal was so strong that it was receivable without antenna.
Leaving the underwood of the forest at its northern edge, I bumped into a guy carrying something that looked remotely like a closed umbrella – maybe a rogue secret agent from Bulgaria with an umbrella gun? Well, his name was Eric (DL5EK) and he had already located the probe high up in a tree. And the thing he was carrying was actually an extendible fishing rod. After some searching, Eric found the probe for the second time and pointed it out to me. Even with the fishing rod there was no way to come somewhere near the probe.
After a little bit of chatting (Eric has found a couple of RS41s in trees but is yet to recover one, but he has found a DFM09 which I am yet to recover) and exchanging experiences, we went back to our cars.
Here, I fixed the decoder — the problem turned out to be a configuration issue. Now, I could decode the probe even without the preamplifier. The current position on the tree was remarkably close to the predicted landing point of www.wetterson.de that was based on the their last telemetry received :
[13595] (N3420523) Sa 2018-03-24 14:06:48.001 lat: 48.67096 lon: 8.88688 alt: 585.02 vH: 0.0 D: 17.9° vV: -0.0 # [00000]
[13596] (N3420523) Sa 2018-03-24 14:06:49.001 lat: 48.67096 lon: 8.88688 alt: 584.93 vH: 0.0 D: 342.1° vV: 0.1 # [00000]
All in all, great weather, a relaxing walk in the field, friendly folks, and a little bit of training in applied radio direction finding.