Another great day for Sonde Recovery here in sunny California. The winds are good, the weather is nice and the sun is still up at landing time giving plenty of light. This Sonde was originally predicted to land near Rancho Murieta, CA but the winds and descent rate changed that to somewhere near Galt, CA. As i drove past Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant (retired) I thought “good thing its not landing here”.
The Sonde started out in Oakland and made steady progress until the balloon burst around 32,000 km, then it made an usual rapid descent into a country neighborhood known as Saddle Creek in a small town called Galt. It seems from the landing site that the parachute only partially deployed explaining the rapid descent. The parachute was not fully deployed because remnants of the balloon entangled the lines below the chute.
The output of r00ts RRS decoder software is shown below. This is a combination of data received from the home station and the mobile station. While in route to landing area, r00t informed me that the home system lost the signal. So I pulled over and pointed the 8 turn helical antenna to re-acquire the signal. This gave us some additional data points for r00t to know which neighborhood the landing will occur. The sonde landed while I was still 14 miles out from area.
As you can see from the image below, as I entered the neighborhood (i have tracker so r00t can see my location) it was pretty easy to re-acquire the signal and get the exact location of the Sonde. It landed in someones backyard and I could see it from along the fence line. I found a neighbor that contacted the properly owner and obtained permission to enter the area and retrieve the Sonde.
The recovered Sonde was in pretty good shape but did have a impact area on bottom due to rapid descent speed.
Here is short video about home receiving station, mobile setup and the recovery of this particular Sonde.
