Lost Weather Balloon!

[GeForce]

Evening guys

£50 reward

We launched a weather balloon today with an electronic radio communications payload on board. Unfortunately we lost it somewhere around the Lincoln area.

It could be as far north as S****horpe (scun-thorpe - word filter!), as far south as Peterborough, or could be somewhere around Nottingham.

If any of you have PMR446 walkie-talkies (8 channels), could you please spare a couple of minutes and help us!

Tune it to channel 5.
Stand at an open window as high as possible.
Listen for modem-type noises. They will be about 2 seconds in length and once per minute.

Even if you don't hear anything please post back, so we know where it isn't.

Would be extremely grateful if a few people around there could do this!

Thanks a lot,
Jon

 

[GeForce]

Cheers guys.

Yes Matt that prediction is correct.

I forgot to mention the £50 reward if you find it, you lot need an incentive!

I estimate we've only got a couple of days before the payload stops transmitting, so if people can just spare 5 minutes ASAP that'd be great

 

[GeForce]

It's a free balloon - ie. non-tethered. We confirmed an altitude of 72,000ft, but we think it probably got to around 90,000ft.

I was always under the impression that weather balloons were expendable. Is this design different or am I wrong?

This one isn't - but you are correct, some designs are indeed expendable.

Jon

 

[GeForce]

142mph? Did it enter the jetstream?

The jetstream was travelling North according to Met office data, but it is possible that that was wrong.

So it could be somewhere around derby?? Will keep an eye out

Some of us live just up the road. Feel for us

Thank you both! If you or a friend have a PMR446 walkie talkie and could spare a couple of minutes, there might be £50 in it for you

You have mentioned it to the police? Some chap might already have found it and handed it in to lost property or whatever.

Very good idea. How do I go about contacting the police about it on a national level?

Why has the GPS stopped transmitting?

The system of course runs from batteries. Whilst they are very high capacity (13Ah) they'll only power the electronics for about 36 hours.



Here's a picture of the payload:

 

[GeForce]

446.05625 MHz

No news as yet!

 

[GeForce]

GeForce - I e-mailed you a while back, did you ever get it?

Sorry to hear about the balloon, short of it going a few hundred miles of course, I don't know if me listening would be any use!

I didn't get it, no. Can you email me again on my address in trust?

There is a possibility it's gone that far offcourse, so if you could have a quick listen it would be very much appreciated

 

[GeForce]

Couple more pics from Launch day

 

[GeForce]

slylittlefox, did you resend that email? If so, I didn't receive it.

Jon

 

[GeForce]

Burnsy, yes it is

We've notified numerous amateur radio clubs in the area, and I'm trying to get through to Lincolnshire police.

If anyone on this forum is around the area, the £50 reward for finding it still stands of course.

 

[GeForce]

Get in touch with BBC Look North which is the most popular local news program for Yorkshire/Lincolnshire.

If they do a story on it there'll be a lot of people on the look out for it, and you never know, they might have already been contacted by someone who's found it.

Will get onto that right now, thank you

Lol, random question but how did you intend to actually get the balloon back? Ow was this your intention all along?

Good luck finding it though, make sure you post some pictures up of what it shot WHEN you find it.

We tracked the balloon for about 2 hours during its flight, and we were thus hopeful we could track it all the way to its landing site. It was only the sudden movement eastwards that prevented this.

We did not exactly expect to be able to recover the payload straight away, but we knew it would be possible given favourable conditions.

WHEN we find it, I'll certainly post lots of pics!

I've got an amateur radio multi-band transceiver, but it will be useless as i can pickup a long distance, so i won't bother trying to find it as it will only widen your search

Hi mate, if you could listen anyway, we'd be very grateful!

446.05625 MHz FM - Channel 5 PMR446 - Modem type noises once a minute.

433.920 Mhz AM - Serial data once every 10 seconds, can be heard on an FM set too.

 

[GeForce]

Yesterday morning (Sunday 26/04/09) at around 10:10 I was walking the dog in Southey Woods, about 6 miles NW of Peterborough city centre when two Islander-type aeroplanes flew over. I trained my binoculars on them but noticed something else high above them. It was a crescent shape like a small moon which was barely moving. I later concluded it was a weather balloon or suchlike. I did a Google search to see if anyone else had spotted one, which is how I arrived at your website. Could this be your balloon? I would have thought that in the elapsed time the wind speed/direction would have taken it to Norway by now. Perhaps this was someone else’s balloon. RAF Wittering or the parachuting club at Sibson or the two aeroplanes could all have released it I suppose. Any ideas? Or was it a UFO after all?

Hi mate, firstly I'd like to thank you for taking the time to register and post.

Unfortunately the likelihood of that being our payload is almost 0. We are 99% sure the payload had landed by 1700BST on Saturday 25/04/09, and there is no way it could have still been airborne the day after.

At the last known position it was descending around 5000 ft/min, so it would have hit the ground shortly after.

The location is certainly a possible landing site, although predictions say further north would be more likely.

 

[GeForce]

^^ Haha

FrostedNipple: could you contact me on my email address in trust please? Thank you

 

[GeForce]

Haven't heard anything, seems very unlikely we will now

There is still some hope, however! A writeup of the project can be found here: http://wiki.ukhas.org.uk/projects:apex-i

We are in the design process for version 2

 

[GeForce]

Hopefully it didn't land anywhere near 'Dogdyke' in the top right hand corner of your first pic!

LOL

Very interesting read, I didn't realise you were using AGWPE, I use that to interface my UI-View system with a Tiny-2 in host mode.

Great program isn't it? It saved us having to buy two expensive hardware terminal node controllers for the base stations. It also allowed a program one of the team members wrote to log packets and decode the avionics sensor data.

There's a more technical writeup here, if you're interested:
http://www.hexoc.com/wb/pages/balloon-project.php

So...if I want to disguise a bomb all I need to is write "harmless amateur radio experiment" on the side?

Yep, works a treat

very interesting. Sorry you didn't find it.

How often was the camera setup to take photos??

I find it weird that the Balloon traveled so far when it had lost GPS tracking, i seem to remember when you first posted this that the Jet stream was heading in that rough direction would that be why it picked up over 100mph?

How high do you think it went in the end?
How High could that balloon type go?

May only get found once farmers start harvesting there fields? And even then it might get chewed up by the machinery

Have you got a map more zoomed in of where the last beacon was? or GPS Coordinates?

The camera was set up on a servo mount, and it took a picture pointing down, then up, then across at the horizon, once per minute. Three pictures per minute in total.

When it travelled East, it was >70,000ft up, which is way above the altitude of the jet stream. The only thing we can put it down to is high altitude winds which neither we, nor the landing predication software, had accounted for.

Our highest confirmed altitude was 72,459ft, but from pressure readings and time of flight, we reckon it probably hit 90,000ft, possibly a bit over. These balloons are constructed for around 100,000ft burst altitude, but this depends on the weight of the payload, how much helium you put in, etc.

Zero pressure balloons maintain a near-zero pressure differential between them and their environment, so can reach much high altitudes. But there needs to be some electronic control of helium release, which adds to payload complexity and weight.

Yeh as I said, there's still some hope of finding it. After the upcoming exams, we're putting together version 2, which will be much lighter, smaller, cheaper and easier to find once it lands!

 

[GeForce]

Good luck with Version 2, keep us posted on it's progress.

Thank you! Version 2 (Apex II) information page at the following address. This is mainly for our own reference, it's just a page for idea collation at the moment:
http://wiki.ukhas.org.uk/projects:apex-ii

What about choosing a recognised APRS frequency on 70cms though?

Also I'm interested by the kit - You said you were able to change the receiver aerial but not the transmitter, so does that mean that you only changed the aerial at the base end or did you split transmit/receive feeds up in the balloon as well?

Oh and an error in your text.... "Packet radio has been around for nearly as long as amateur radio". No it hasn't. I've been using first Cambridge Packet on the BBC micro and then AX25 for over twenty years, but amateur radio has been around for far longer than that, not just slightly longer but a lot longer.

We did consider 70cms APRS, but this is still amateur radio frequencies and the license terms seem to forbid its usage for unmanned airborne ops. Having talked to the RSGB and Ofcom, it seems to be a bit of a grey area, however.

In the end we did change the transmitter antenna on the balloon. Both that, and the antennas on the vehicles, were eggbeaters. This gave us good horizon coverage with a nice even radiation pattern, whilst taking gain from -3dBm with the inbuilt antenna to around 6dBm with the eggs.

The system was half duplex, using 446 MHz for both the up and downlink. We never talked to the balloon during the flight - there was no need. The system worked perfectly under testing, though. In hindsight, we would have cut the balloon down as soon as the GPS lost satellite lock.

Thanks for pointing that out, I've now changed it

Apex II basically sets out to achieve the same goals - ie. high altitude photography. We'll be using just 10mW on 434.075 Mhz this time, to make use of a distributed listener set up for balloon flights used by most people in the UK who do this kind of thing.

The payload will broadcast on this frequency on both 50 and 300 baud RTTY once per minute. The payload will also carry ionising radiation detectors. We'll have a GSM mobile phone onboard, which will be controlled by the flight computer and made to text us GPS coordinates after landing.

If you'd like any more info or anything, post back.

 

[GeForce]

Sound very cool, good luck with version 2!

Thanks!

Very interesting. I'm assuming you needed to get CAA permission to launch this?

Yes we did. The specific department is the Airspace Utilisation Section (AUS) of the CAA. Very helpful chap there guided us through the process required for getting permission & made it very easy. The permission was valid for a 6 hour window at a certain location.

 

[GeForce]

Now that intrigues me again - 434.075 is within 70cms but I'm assuming the frequency is dedicated for this sort of thing, unattended airborne operation. I guess because 70cms is a shared band whereas 2m isn't that you can do this without any problem. Do you have to have a callsign attached to the RTTY or is that not needed? I ask that because I noticed you had a call on the beacons from Apex I as well as a beacon path

434.075 MHz is not a dedicated frequency, but it is extremely rarely used. It's designated as channel 41 of the LPD433 frequencies, but very few devices seem to use it. Hence the reason balloonists began to use it, and now the distributed listener network uses it as well.

The callsign system on Apex I was in use primarily because the system used APRS. This meant we used existing software and code, which were designed for amateur packet use (AGWPE, APRSPoint, ax25d, beacon, libax25). Of course, these required a callsign. Apart from making the system compatible with existing software, the callsign served no other purpose.

The listening daemon on the flight computer was locked down to respond to packets from only one callsign, but any SSID. This gave us some degree of security whilst allowing multiple base stations control over the onboard avionics.

On Apex II, a callsign will also be used. This is required as part of the message transmission protocol (link). The distributed listener network feeds to the internet, so when watching the internet feed, the callsign can be used to identify a particular payload if there happen to be multiple ones.