Recap of EOSS-103/104

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by Benjie Campbell, W0CBH

Boy, did we have fun. Colin (WG0E) and I (W0CBH) had the normal trip to the breakfast site in Fort Morgan. The usual crowd was there, the locals that is, and several of them remarked they were glad to see us, thinking we were storm trackers. They figured it would rain, if we were looking for storms. We let them down gently when we told them who we really were and why we were in their fair city.

The trackers deployed to the assigned areas suggested by the tracking coordinator Larry (N0NDM) Noble. Colin and I went to the intersection of country road 80 and CR-115. This site was west and slightly south of highway 14, west of New Raymer, CO.

When EOSS 103 began its ascent, we didn't receive the balloon tracking data for several minutes, about 5 minutes after everyone else. I became suspicious of the data later in the flight, after burst. The data in GridCalc 2.1 wasn't realistic and seemed jumping around more this flight than Eoss 102.

Larry requested Colin and I to return to the New Raymer area and help Station Bravo locate and recover the payloads. We drove east and then north out of New Raymer on CR-129 where we found Bravo, Ben and Chris with several student cars waiting for the payload to land. We continued north and then east tracking the signal from the DF beacon. We made a complete circle of the area and ended back up with Ben and Chris, before the payload hit the deck. We then used the DFing equipment to locate the payload in a field to the west and north of CR-129 and CR-88. Colin finally saw it in the field about 75 yards from the road.

We drove up to an Air Force structure and talked with the personnel there to try and discover who owned the land. They didn't know. We decided to go ahead and recover the payload when the students arrived, and they went out into the field to recover their experiments. A rancher driving by stopped and asked me what was going on. I explained to him who we were and why we were there. He said the land was probably federal since the fence was a four wire type and in good shape. We laughed and he drove away, totally unconcerned. The students returned with their equipment and we decided to head for Eoss 104.

After the recovery we drove back through the track of the balloons to see if we could see the fallen rover that deployed prematurely from one of the Eoss 103 packages. We were unable to find it and continued on to the Pepper Pod for our fine after flight lunch.