Coming back from the AMSAT symposium in Bochum, I detoured to get a probe launched from Idar-Oberstein. Some packages I received en route with the eggbeater antenna. In 6200 meters altitude I lost the probe. There, it came down with 12m/s indicating that the parachute had not fully opened. I continued on to the landing zone near Langschied. About an hour after landing I arrived and could reacquired the signal:
[13766] (P0350071) So 2018-09-30 14:18:25.000 lat: 50.17461 lon: 7.95739 alt: 570.19 vH: 0.1 D: 283.9° vV: -0.0
The rest was pretty standard. I went to the GPS position and found the probe nearby. The parachute was stuck in the tree tops so I could only recover the probe.
I continued further south to Stuttgart. Near Viernheimer Kreuz, close to the border of the states of Hessen and Baden-Württemberg, a probe (P0350063) coming also from Idar-Oberstein had gone down 2 days earlier. I drove off the highway and looked a little bit around for it but found only a plastic bag in a field. The battery must have been empty by now and without radio transmission one finds the probe only by luck. As I realized later, another user of www.radiosondy.info, Lobelt, had also looked for the probe on the morning of September 28th and not found a trace. Most likely, it had entangled itself in the high voltage transmission lines. Maybe the operator of the transmission line had already removed it.
