U2430341

Day one

This was the first time I had tried to recover a radio sonde. It landed near Farnham and I was reaonably familiar with the area. My wife tagged along and acted as driver.

My equipment is home made and very much looks that way. The antenna is a home made j-stick mounted on the end of a plastic waste pipe. I started just north of the A31 road by parking up at the Tongham community centre. I could receive the signal quite well on my TTGO using rdz_ttgo_sonde software. As I was sitting outside the community centre taking the GPS position, I was asked if I was trying to hack their WiFi and I was told there was nothing worth stealing.

As the tracker I made did not have GPS, I had to type the position into my phone to work out how far away I was. On reflection, this was bad way to work out the position as I could have one all this before I set off from home. My phone said the radio sonde was right on the A31 road.

As I was already parked up, my wife and I decided to walk South to see if we could reach the A31. After a few minutes walking we found no way to cross some fields so we headed back to the car. Once there we saw on the map, there was a cafe in Seal, the Manor Farm Tea Room, just south of the A31 so we headed for there.

My wife dropped me off near the slip-road exiting the A31 and headed off for coffee. I left my receiver in the car and I walked up the slip road. I knew the location of the radio sonde so I thought I would not need the receiver. Once on the path by the side of the A31, I could not see the radio sonde and regretted not taking the receiver with me.

Not all was lost because on the north side of the A31, I could see what looked like a red parachute. The A31 is a dual carriage way and very busy with most cars travelling at 70mph on that section, so I had to walk a few hundred metres before I could find a safe place to cross. On the other (north) side, I recovered the parachute but no sign of the radio sonde and by now, I was on the opposite side of the road to GPS location of the radio sonde.

Having crossed back to the south side of the road, I stumbled across the thin nylon string used to tether the radio sonde to the parachute. Tugging on the nylon revealed the radio sonde at the top of a tall tree. I was not going to attempt to climb the tree, especially as it was right by a very busy road. What seems to have happened is the radio sonde landed at the top of the tree and the parachute drifted across two lanes of the A31 where the nylon string would have been severed by fast moving traffic.

After trying some vigerous tugging, I decided to give up and walk down the hill to the cafe where my wife was waiting. Over coffee, I hatched a plan.

Day two

Armed with a long tree trimming pole, gardening gloves, and my receiver, my wife dropped me off on the slip road again and she went to a coffee again.

This time I was ready to trim the very top of the tree to recover the radio sonde but the pole I had did not quite reach. It was two metres too short, however, I could grip a lower branch and shake the tree a little. After a few attempts, I managed to pull in synchronisation with the swaying branches and pretty soon, the top of the tree was swinging wildly as we reached resonance. The radio sonde was flung out of the tree and to the ground. It was a bit battered and the temperature senson was broken but I had recovered my first radio sonde.

All that was left now was to pick up all my equipment and walk down the hill to the cafe for a celebratory coffee.

The track of this radio sonde is recoded on radiosondy.info.