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NSTAR 05-A Flight Summary |
Flight 05-A - 26 February 2005 - 0908 CST (1508 UTC)
Our first flight of the year was on a clear and cool February
morning, with a few cirrus clouds beginning to come overhead.
As we drove out to the launch site, several locations with flags flying
indicated to us there might be a little breeze to contend with.
We arrived at the launch site around 0800 and began unpacking our
equipment. Shawn, a newbie to our
hobby, graciously brought us some donuts to enjoy.
Most of the time the wind was quiet, but a few gusts to around 10 mph
came now and again. We began filling
the balloon about 0845 and didn’t have much trouble, though.
The payloads were all activated and checked out, and the stack was
released at 09:07:45 CST.
As we were getting ready to leave, I noticed that the main beacon had ceased transmitting data at about 0922 and 20,000 ft. While I was double-checking my radio settings, I received a call from Ralph W0RPK who said he observed the same thing and that the main beacon’s transmitter had remained on for over two minutes with an unmodulated carrier before shutting off entirely. This was disconcerting, as this would be our second main payload problem in as many flights. I called on the simplex repeater (which was working well) to let everyone know they should track the backup beacon instead. Wayne KE6DZD had the presence of mind to place his TH-D7 on the main beacon’s frequency with the volume up so if it came back we’d know it.
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NSTAR 05-A Flight Summary |
Now it appeared the landing would be just northeast of Massena by two or three miles. As the balloon came down, I estimated we could get to the landing site if we didn’t make any navigation mistakes. As we got near Massena, Wayne’s D7 came to life, indicating the main payload had begun to function again. I switched my tracking radio back to the main beacon and the data looked good. This would make the end of our chase easier, as the main payload reports positions twice a minute and even more frequently during the final two minutes of flight.
The payloads all functioned after landing and were undamaged. After reviewing the data, it appears the DataTrak PIC (which replaced our KPC-3) may have “frozen”, causing the transmitter to remain on but sending no data. What caused it to resume functioning again later is not known. Over 100 pictures were taken by the digital camera, and some showed evidence of strong RF fields (a herringbone pattern in the image). One potential way to mitigate this is to put the payload antenna on a ground plane – this should also help the digital-camera-to-GPS interference problem observed on the last flight.
The launch from the Wahoo swapmeet went pretty well given the
circumstances. All of the tall buildings had nearby power lines, so we had
to use a smaller building to provide some shelter. It helped a little bit
but not much. The winds were gusting to around 20 mph by the time we
launched the 1200g Kaymont balloon at 0842 CDT.
Because I was in a hurry with the winds increasing, I did not have a chance to
check the simplex repeater before launch. I'm pretty sure I powered it on,
but may have had a loose connection between the repeater unit and the HT.
That appeared to get bumped back into place on landing, as it worked after that
point.
We headed east towards Elkhorn, then northeast to Blair. No major problems
were noted during the ascent as both beacons were transmitting reliably.
The fun started after burst. We were stopped in Blair at a grocery store
parking lot. At one point, Wayne KE6DZD said something about the backup
beacon's altitude being at eighty thousand feet. Since the main payload
was down in the 60s, I thought it had lost GPS lock or something. A minute
later he said it was at 3300 ft. As we were talking about it, it became
apparent that I misheard his first report - it was *eight* thousand, not
*eighty* thousand. Since the two reports were probably a minute apart,
this was a fall speed of around 5000 ft/minute, which is roughly the terminal
velocity of the backup beacon.......
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NSTAR 05-B Summary |
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Search area for backup beacon |
So we knew that one fell off. I wrote down the lat/lon/course/speed
of the 3375' report for future reference. We weren't too concerned about
finding it - it wouldn't go far horizontally in the 30 seconds it would take to
hit the ground. We chased the other payload northeast from Blair to a
couple miles north of Magnolia, IA. We were fortunate that this area was
less wooded than the hills adjacent to the flood plain and the payload had come
down in an open field. We picked it up and headed back towards Blair.
As we started off, I plugged the posit into APRSPlus and saw the location was
just a few tens of yards off Hwy 75 southeast of Blair. Doing some mental
calculations and knowing the low-level wind reports, I figured we needed to
search NNE of the last report up to about a quarter-mile at the most.
When we get to the location, we find the terrain is pretty wooded and rough.
However, there is a clearing at the top of a ridge that is roughly along the
desired bearing from the last report. We walk along it and search what we
can of the ravines on either side without climbing down into them. We get
to the northeast end of the ridgeline and find we are 0.2 miles from the last
report, close to the farthest distance I figure it has gone. Two or three
from the group climb down the ridge and take a quick look at the bottom, and
eyeball the open field to the north. No joy. We also have our D7s
along and tuned to the beacon, but nothing there either. That wasn't
unexpected, as something probably broke after a 60-mph impact. After 45
minutes of searching, we call it off and head for lunch. As dense as the
woods and undergrowth was in places, we needed to look at some more data to
refine our search area.
Further analysis shows that we were generally looking in the right area, but
needed to emphasize our search at the north extent of where we looked. The
search area graphic shows the furthest extent of the likely landing, but it most
likely landed south of the railroad tracks. We returned to the area on May 14
and looked for about two hours, emphasizing the area between the bluffs and the
railroad tracks. Still no luck, however.
We did get quite a few good still pictures (one attached showing the balloon remains _ the town in the lower center is Modale IA). The tape recorded to completion, but I still haven't had time to look at it.
Update, January 2006: A person working along the railroad tracks in the area spotted the payload and called me about it (my cell # and e-mail were on the beacon in permanent marker). I was driving at the time and could not take a phone number, so I told the person to e-mail me his contact info. It was another three weeks before I got the e-mail, but we did make contact again and I recovered the payload on 31 January
The payload was in very good shape. A couple sides of it
were faded from sun exposure, but the VX-2R works fine. The LED flasher
also still worked. I have not yet tested the GPS unit, and the lithium-ion
pack connected to it is probably ruined. The payload was found right along
the north side of the tracks to the east of our search zone above. On the
map above, it was found just west where the power line crosses the tracks.
From the verbal description I got the landing was at 41°
31.00' N, 96° 05.00' W (click on link for Google map, location
accurate to within +/- 0.02' lat and 0.07' lon).
Our third flight of the year
was a tandem effort with the first flight of the Central Nebraska Near Space
Project (CNNSP), which is based in
We arrived shortly after 8am and began setting up. The winds were practically calm with a mid-level overcast and we could see a few very light showers in the area. After checking everything over, we released the payloads at 0859 CDT (1359 UTC) under a 1000g “cold-weather” Kaymont balloon.
The initial ascent was almost
vertical and we could see the balloon disappear into the cloud deck around
14,000 ft. After we lost sight of
the balloon, we left the launch site and headed towards
Our chase plan was to head
around the west and south sides of
Burst occurred at 92,434 ft and 1013 CDT (1513 UTC). We stopped in Elmwood to see how the descent would progress, then once the balloon dropped below about 20,000 ft we headed towards the expected landing site.
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NSTAR 05-C Flight Summary |
Several vehicles converged from different directions on the landing site, which was near a farm a few miles northeast of Elmwood. Since the winds were so light for the lowest 10,000 ft, we could get out of our vehicles to watch the descent. We watched the payloads land in a cornfield about 20 yards off the road at 1100 CDT (1600 UTC).
While many of us were coming from the west, Tony KC0RJL came from the east and was closest to the farmhouse. The farmer had apparently seen our vehicles stop and observe the landing and was upset about a number of things. First, we had been there for 5-10 minutes but hadn’t tried to make contact (but he may not have realized we were watching the landing in progress). Second, once he heard the word “balloon” he was even less happy because some hot-air balloonists had scared his cattle the previous week. Tony, to his credit, was very diplomatic and secured permission for us to retrieve our payloads, after which we were instructed to “get the **** out”.
So we got our payloads and got
the **** out. We went back to the
gas station in Elmwood to check our equipment over and exchange data.
The NSTAR payload logged about 4400 data records and took about 115
pictures, including one showing an aircraft passing some distance away and
another one taken just a second or two before touchdown.
The CNNSP payload also took quite a few pictures and the APRS beacon
functioned pretty well – there were some missing reports that were probably
due to poor reception when we were too far under the balloon.
The CNNSP folks headed home to
The NSTAR payload flew in tandem with CNNSP for this year's GPSL. Unfortunately, the payload's GPS came unhooked from the computer shortly before launch and produced no data while in flight. We successfully tracked the CNNSP payload and recovered it between Grant and Elliott, IA.
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Landing sites for GPSL 2005 flights |
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Detail view of some of the landing sites |
This flight was a dual launch, paired with the first flight of the Central Iowa Balloon Enthusiasts (CIBE). Our initial plan was to launch from the parking lot of the Adair-Casey High School between the two towns of the same name, but when we arrived we found the gates to the school grounds locked and no suitable site was found near by. We had a discussion on the radio on what to use in Adair as a substitute. As we headed back to town, one of the group spotted an open area adjacent to a cemetery north of town that looked suitable. We got everyone to the new launch site and began to set up. Jenny, daughter of Wayne KE6DZD, loaded her “Peep-O-Nauts” into the backup beacon for their ride to near-space.
The weather on this day was overcast and we noticed some fog patches as we drove on I-80 from Omaha to Adair. Surface winds were very light from the northwest with temps around 40.
As we were preparing to launch, a couple of vehicles pulled in behind ours. We thought maybe it was someone from Adair who had seen us, but instead it was some hunters from Minnesota who were also hams. They had seen all the vehicles with ham antennas plus the balloons and, in their words, “just had to stop to see what this was about”.
We launched the balloons simultaneously at 0827 CST (1427 UTC). For the early part of the flight, the balloons were separated by only a few hundred feet vertically and less than ¼ to ½ mile horizontally. I was hoping we’d have several photos of the CIBE balloon with NSTAR’s still camera, but the only ones where a balloon was visible was within the first couple of minutes.
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NSTAR 05-E Flight Summary |
Wayne KE6DZD holds the main payload |
The NSTAR payload showed evidence of a minor programming problem. During the first couple minutes of flight, the payload was to take one picture and send a position every 8 seconds or so, then every 30 seconds after that. However, the payload remained on the 8-sec interval throughout the flight. I had some concern for battery life, but the battery voltage telemetry indicated it was holding up fine. The camera, however, shot the entire 512 Mb card full before reaching burst.
We chased west to Atlantic and then south on US 71 as we were expecting the landing near 34 and 71 east of Red Oak, waiting just outside of Grant for the burst of our 1200g Kaymont balloon. This happened 76 minutes into the flight, at 94,964 ft.
Both balloons followed a similar track, but the CIBE balloon was coming down first. During the descent, we knew the balloon would come southwest until a few thousand feet AGL, then turn southeast. However, we were not sure if either balloon would make it south of US34 or west of US71. We stopped a mile or two north of the intersection to wait until the track became more clear, then headed east on US34 about a mile.
In this area, the overcast was fairly high and we were able to spot the CIBE parachute at about 3000 ft AGL and less than a mile away. Between the roads not cooperating and not wanting to lose position for the NSTAR landing, and we were unable to get in place to watch the CIBE landing directly as it went down behind a row of trees. We were, however, able to drive right past the landing site as it was only a few yards off a gravel road in a cornfield.
The NSTAR payload was now below 5000 ft and we could see it also. It landed much further into a field away from the road at 1025 CST (1625 UTC). Larry N0BKB made contact with the farmer who owned the field and secured permission for us to go retrieve it.
The payloads were undamaged and all were functional. The Peeps were none the worse for their trip to near space – I had thought that the decompression might cause them more trouble.
After the trip, we tried to find a spot in Villisca to eat but none were open yet. We headed for the buffet at Pizza Hut in Red Oak for a well-deserved lunch break.
