[Vk5-wx-sonde] [HORUS] Not-So-High-Altitude Balloon Launch - 8th August 11AM, now from Auburn

[Mark Jessop]

Thanks again to all that helped out today, be it out chasing the balloon,
or tracking from home.

The launch went off easily, with only a light sprinkling of showers at the
launch site. We had a few visitors, including Terry VK5ATF and Ian VK5CZ.
The balloon+payloads immediately entered cloud, which resulted in lots of
rather boring Wenet imagery, but good data for the experiment! After rising
above the cloud layers at about 8km altitude, we decided to terminate the
flight and land the payloads to the west of Clare. The cutdown device took
a few burns to work (it was -45 degC outside at the time, so this is not
too surprising), but pretty quickly the payloads were on their way back
down, to land just 100m into a paddock.

Even with the launch being quite a fair way to the north of Adelaide, we
had quite a few people tracking:

Callsign,Received Packets,Percentage of Flight Received,First-Received
Altitude (m),Last-Received Altitude (m)
VK5APR,821,82.8%,835,1526
VK5HS,677,68.2%,2146,3090
VK5KG-5,954,96.2%,490,468
VK5KX,738,74.4%,545,496
VK5LJG,623,62.8%,1047,3122
VK5LJG-9,208,21.0%,310,3033
VK5LN,294,29.6%,4038,5778
VK5NEX,534,53.8%,968,7976
VK5NTM,751,75.7%,1064,1301
VK5PE,330,33.3%,4113,7170
VK5QI-1,921,92.8%,515,468
VK5QI-9,951,95.9%,310,211
VK5ST-8,685,69.1%,649,1526
VK5TRM,690,69.6%,1672,2611
VK5TRM-12,659,66.4%,1832,3044

We even had a few people receiving Wenet imagery:
VK5QI-9: 169086 packets (41.28 MB)
VK5KG-6: 43413 packets (10.60 MB)
VK5PW: 46276 packets (11.30 MB)
VK5KX-9: 39981 packets (9.76 MB)
VK5ST: 5454 packets (1.33 MB)

Some photos from the launch are here: https://imgur.com/a/cZsB4Po

There'll likely be another one of these short launches to gather more
experimental data. Again, this will be highly weather dependent, but I'll
try and give as much notice as possible.

Thanks again!

73
Mark VK5QI
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