SondehuntOn 27.02. the weather looked favourable for the lunchtime sonde from Essen, everything hinted at a landing in a narrower radius around Gummersbach. So I made an appointment with Keanu around 13:15 o’clock to make a new attempt to observe the landing of a probe. But from the beginning I had to fight with problems. wetterson.de was partly down, the RS41 tracker didn’t like decoding on the MacBook at first and the USB extension for the SDR had a loose contact, so that the huge stick, which was now plugged directly into the USB socket, made no reliable contact.
Somehow I got everything going, and one bright spot was that the 6 m pole, which I had ordered from wimo, was already in the delivery van. So I quickly rebuilt the prototype for the hot wire cutter, which is supposed to be attached to the quadrocopter, for operation on a power bank with 5 m supply cable, and was all the more pleased that the package arrived just before one o’clock. To be on the safe side I threw a coat hanger hook and Gaffa into the backpack.
Unfortunately the rig had an extraordinarily good parachute, so that the sonde sailed as far as Morsbach, where we barely missed the landing in a forest. We fought our way up a steep hill about 150 m, only to find out that the parachute was in unreachable height and the probe was about 3,50 m high. We went back to the car to get the pole. When I unpacked the disappointmentfollowed soon: A soldering point on the hot wire cutter had come loose because I had just thrown it into my backpack. So the coat hanger hook had its chance, even with him the rescue succeeded. The sonde went into the transport box and on went the journey.
