Just how did that happen?
As mentioned in other radio sonde posts, I am not the only one in this area who searches for radio sondes. This time was no excpetion.
I watched this one online and the track was all over the place for a lot of its journey. With just a few km of height to go it looked like it was going to land near Lasham airfield in almost the same place as W1010007.
We stopped in the car park on Spain Lane. Right next to us was a familiar car. It would be a race across the footpaths to see who arrived first.
I had no signal from the radio sonde at the car park but after a few hundred metres I picked up a signal. It indicated the radio sonde had landed in a nearby field. After following the footpath to the top of the hill and through a gate, I crawled through some undergrowth and about 200m away was the parachute. Also, about 150m ahead of me was a familiar face.
We collected the kit and walked back to the car park. I mentioned that a radio sonde had been launched from Reading with a pressure sensor and I had been trying to find one of those for a long time but they always seemed to land miles away. He said he remembered me saying that the last time we met in a field and had found one. He had put it in his car to give to me in case we met again. Back at the car, he gave me the one he had saved for me along with a second one of a newer type that he could not power up to obtain GPS telemetry.
So just what happened here? I started out to find a radio sonde but I was beaten to it but I came away with two radio sondes, one of which contained a pressure sensor module.
The track of this radio sonde is recoded on radiosondy.info.