[aprssig] K6RPT-15 Balloon Aloft

[Stephen H. Smith]

On 2/12/2011 9:51 PM, alexandru wrote:
> is this high altitude for K6RPT-15, a new record for a baloon ?


NO Technical problems -- see below for final report.


>
> anyway, Ron, congratulations for that a great job; for you and for the team !
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Stephen H. Smith <wa8lmf2 at aol.com>
> *To:* TAPR APRS Mailing List <aprssig at tapr.org>
> *Sent:* Sun, February 13, 2011 12:33:55 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [aprssig] K6RPT-15 Balloon Aloft
>
> On 2/12/2011 3:08 PM, Tom wrote:
> > So how did this go? There appeared to be a loss of signal from time to 
> time. The last position I say had the balloon at 110,00 ft but never say it 
> descend?
> > Tom
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Stephen H. Smith <wa8lmf2 at aol.com 
> <mailto:wa8lmf2 at aol.com> <mailto:wa8lmf2 at aol.com <mailto:wa8lmf2 at aol.com>>> 
> wrote:
> >
> > K6RPT-15 balloon has launched.
> >
> > <http://wa8lmf.net/LiveTrack> for UIview color-coded track and
> > 3D-look topo maps.
> >
>
>
> No further info on what happened so far. My guess is that the electronics 
> froze at altitude, became intermittent and then failed completely.
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am not part of the team that built/launched the balloon -- only an onlooker 
that posted announcements to several lists, and setup a tracking system on my 
website. The final report, from the

<http://californianearspaceproject.com> website:

"Ron K6RPT says:
February 12, 2011 at 11:34 pm

The fill and launch of K6RPT-15 went well today. The flight was doing well 
until it reached an altitude of 54,475 feet. Then we stopped receiving APRS 
packets at 60 second intervals. We only received two more packets after that, 
75,465 and 110,889. The Stratofox tracking & recovery teams were in the Central 
Valley for the recovery, one team in a plane and teams on the ground. They 
reported being able to see the balloon burst at 10:12 a.m. That is 17 minutes 
after the last packet we received at 110,889 feet. The average accent rate 
between 75,465 and 110,889 was 1265 fpm. If the flight continued at that rate 
for 17 more minutes, we should have reached an altitude of 132,394 feet, but 
since we just can’t seem to catch a break lately, we’ll never know. The tracker 
that we used has worked perfectly on two other flights, so we have no idea what 
happened on this one. The tracker has not been recovered.

-Ron K6RPT"