The HSIS group completed their first test flight this past Saturday, April 10th. We had a camera scripted to take pictures every few seconds and a cell phone setup to post it’s GPS coordinates to a website to track on the ground. We were invited to hitchhike on one of UAH’s balloons. At 9am Saturday we met, activated, and assembled our payload for a 10am launch time.
Our payload went up without a hitch, but our cell phone was no longer tracking after it had been packaged.
Every other balloon was using a more expensive APRS solution. This has the benefits of not relying on the cell network and nodes all over already logging APRS trackers to websites.
We launched second at just about 10am Saturday morning. After thirty or forty minutes of watching the other team start tracking theirs and starting to track ours, Ethan(spacefelix) left to go chase ours with one of the UAH drivers. About noon, the team back home and the Ethan’s team in the field had tracked the balloon to a height of 83k feet and where it landed up US-72 towards the Alabama/Tennessee/Georgia corner. After a little bit, while Ethan’s team tried to get over to it, the payload moved down US-72 a ways. I’m still not sure why this happened. Theories are that someone picked it up, or the wind caught the parachute and carried it. About three hours of searching around, Ethan’s team finally found two of the UAH balloons right next to each other. They then went to help look for the rest of the balloons.
Positives: Nothing was lost.
Negatives: Nothing worked.
Our payload went up and down just fine. The cell phone didn’t track like expected and the camera had issues taking pictures. We were able to recover everything where we analyzed it at Monday’s meeting and already started working on a new way to hold the payloads and a better tracking system.
We all had fun building, testing, launching and tracking. We owe a big thank you to Bill Brown and UAH’s senior engineering classes for letting us hitchhike on one of their balloons. We hope to launch again soon, this time with a fully working payload. Detailed flight records, thoughts and notes available on our wiki page.