2020-12-13: RS41 from Idar-Oberstein to Scharnhausen

The morning probe coming from Idar-Oberstein landed somewhere near Scharnhausen. The telemetry was lost at 9:04h in 471 m height.

Felix and myself were slowly in deciding to give it a go and after a lazy start we left around 13:15h. We received the probe with around 7 km to go to the landing site. As I found out later on, this corresponded to around 4 km direct line of sight. Consequently, I expected to find the probe high up in a tree. As the probe was transmitting for almost 7 hours, I was  concerned that the battery might run dry. So we stopped and  after fiddling a bit around with my gear, I decoded  a fix:

nc -lu 6000 | sox -t raw -esigned-integer -b16 -r 48000 –  -t wav –  lowpass 2100 2>/dev/null | ./rs41dm_dft  

[29309] (R3320048) So 2020-12-13 12:33:10.001 lat: 48.70273 lon: 9.27476 alt: 370.77 vH: 0.1 D: 80.3 vV: 0.0
[29310] (R3320048) So 2020-12-13 12:33:11.001 lat: 48.70273 lon: 9.27476 alt: 370.44 vH: 0.1 D: 344.5 vV: -0.1

Once we arrived, we went the last kilometer on foot. Near the landing point we directly found the rest of the balloon and the parachute. To get to the probe we had to  negotiated difficult terrain and make our way  uphill through thorny underwood. We found the probe lying on the ground. In the process however we lost a rubber plug which we did not find even after a longer search. Considering that the probe was lying on the ground, the distance from that we could receive it, is really remarkable.