Recap of EOSS-140/141

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Recap

by Mark Patton, KC0D

Marty made the command decision that being the tracker neophyte, he wanted me run TrackPoint on this flight while he negotiated some of the the more interesting roads in Eastern Colorado.

We headed out I-76 towards the landing site and confirmed our fears that somewhere just outside of Akron we would lose repeater coverage. Not to fear though - we located a high spot just South of the predicted landing site. The interesting thing about this spot was that the repeater was very weak just below, but right where we were sitting it was full scale. Marty checked in with Nick at the ground station and confirm that he had perfect copy. Great! We broke out the PB&J sandwiches and celebrated and waited for the balloons to come to us. If need be, we could relay between the ground and the trackers. Murphy had other ideas. Not more than 10 minutes later, without moving the vehicle an inch, the repeater dropped below an S1 and we were not able to hit it either. Nuts! Must be some sort of weird UHF propagation that lasted about 10 minutes.

One high point was that we were able to copy APRS from AE0SS-11 once it hit about 10K feet. That is better than we had experienced in the past. We had solid copy the rest of the flight.

The main dirt roads in the area were - can I say- exciting? Once we got on the less traveled roads, they cleared up with the best road being the two track farmer's road into the landing site. Once we were within a mile or so and directly West of the last packet, Marty whipped out his DF gear, swung the beam and said " It's right out there" - directly West of us. Larry Noble estimated it was behind the rise about a half mile away, which turned out to be right. We headed down the road and luckily found a less traveled road that headed off in the direction of the payloads. Once we hit the high spot, Marty again pulled out his trusty beam and said "It's that way toward those two houses on the horizon". Being a neophyte tracker, I figured with the wind blowing slightly out of the South, that I should be able to see the bright orange chute - right? Wrong. I saw what appeared to be a small wagon wheel poking up out of the grass. I headed that way to investigate and before getting very far, realized that it was the payload string laying down in the tall grass with the chute laying flat. The "wagon wheel" was the spreader ring resting on its edge. Go figure...

I gained a new respect for the value of DF gear in the hands of a capable DF'er like Marty. He was dead on in the direction of the payload. I guess we could have geocached it from the last reported position but what fun is that?

I also now understand why Nick includes all those cool features in TrackPoint for the trackers. With Marty's guidance, we ended up using most of them at one time or another!