The probe was predicted to land near Pullach — one prediction run put the probe at the backyard of the BND, the German intelligence service . Even though it was far, I decided to go for it.

www.wetterson.de tracked the probe to an altitude of 750 meters. The probe would eventually drop a little bit short of Pullach into the Forstenrieder Park at 9:40 AM. At this point in time I was about 120 km away and could not receive the probe.

First I went to Schorn that is south of Forstenrieder Park. Passing by the park on the high way, I could shortly hear the probe with the radio. Good.

In Schorn, I found a spot where I got a reasonably good signal from the probe. Decoding it, I had my GPS fix — good:

[17032] (L4743676) (2018-08-13) Mo 09:15:42.720 lat: 48.03539 lon: 11.45236 alt: 705.7 (d:72.1) vH: 2.1 D: 18.8° vV: 3.1 DOP[16,21,29,26,4] 29.4

Reaching the park was not really easy as it is rather large and not really accessible by car. I drove as close to the probe as I could — and I still had to hike for about 40 minutes and 4 km. Looking at the fir trees that were about 25 m and more high I became somewhat pessimistic about the possibility to recover it. The forest resembled those I had visited with my grandparents as a child. Same look and same smell. Maybe we had even been in that very park together — loooong ago. I liked it.

I finally arrive around 12:40 in the landing zone and I quickly located the probe hanging in a tree near the decoded GPS position — unfortunately in around 20 m height. I had brought a telescope rod with around 8m — no way to recover the probe. I returned to Stuttgart with nothing but a couple of pictures.

Bearings (red) and my hike to the probe (blue)

Probe dangling in tree — so far away from me, so far I just can’t see

Shadow of me thinking: How on earth will I be able to retrieve it

Interesting looking tree with parasites, I assume

Update on 2018-09-03

As I learned from Rolf, he was there around 10:00 h. He also could not retrieve the probe.

Update on 2020-01-03

I visited Arndt, a friend of mine living in Munich. We went on a bike ride and checked for the probe. The weather was great. Arriving there, we realized that the probe was gone. It still was a nice ride.