An ozon probe was predicted to be carried in a western direction and to land somewhere near Nördlingen. With a 110 km from Stuttgart that is still far. Normally however, they fly in an easterly or southerly direction and land far more than 200 km away.
The probe is normally started at around 5 am UTC, and wetterson.de acquires the signal around 15 minutes later. At 5:30 h UTC, there was still no signal of the probe, so I became doubtful if the weather center in Hohenpeissenberg would really launch the probe. I was thinking of going back when the wetterson.de showed the probe at around 5:50 h UTC.
The rest was uneventful. The balloon burst in about 34 km altitude at 7:22 h UTC. Eventually, the landing prediction shifted from Ederheim near Nördlingen to Dillingen an der Donau. That was further South than I had expected, and with road blocks and detours, it took me around 45 minutes to get to Dillingen. In the process I lost the signal and I could only reacquire it in Dillingen. The probe was already on the ground and its gps produced no data any longer. www.wetterson.de had received the last transmission near the river Danube which was not directly accessible by car. So I looked for a parking space in the vicinity and did the last kilometer on foot. Nearing the probe, the signal ceased — which could only mean that somebody else had found it. A short time later, I had located 2 other radio hams in a clearing in the process of recovering the probe. Rawan (DF7RW) was the first one to reach the probe.
