Our family did a “test flight” on Sunday, March 11, with three 36-inch diameter balloons filled to approximately 24-inches in diameter. The payload was simple: a 36″ parachute and a Motorola i290 IDEN network phone that was running a GPS tracking application that relayed the coordinates, altitude and speed every 30 seconds.
Unfortunately, all did not go as planned. 1) The first balloon we filled exploded during filling due to a sharp edge on the 8.5 cubic foot tanks we were using – leaving us with less helium than we planned to use. 2) The phone stopped relaying data to the ground about 27 minutes after release…. Luckily, it began transmitting again almost 2 hours later – just 20 minutes before it landed. Unfortunately, I had misconfigured the “buffer” and only the last 5 minutes of the 2 hours of “missed” flight time was recovered.
We made no attempt to recover the package as the intention from the start was this was a “disposable” test package.
Flight Path:
Distance Traveled: 80.9 miles
Average Speed: 30 mph
Starting Altitude: 354 ft
Maximum Recorded Altitude: 6590 ft
The maximum recorded altitude is very likely *much* lower than the actual maximum attained altitude – it’s sad that the data was lost as we’d love to know the maximum altitude.
Changes that will be made for the “real” launch: 1) Use an 80 cubic foot helium tank, 2) Attach an antenna to the cellular phone to hopefully prevent the loss of transmission of the GPS data, 3) Increase the buffer for the GPS data to hold at least 5 hours of data, 4) Add a hole to the parachute to reduce the “drift” of the package during descent.
