A long walk on a sunny day
I received an alert email from the SQ6KXY Radiosonde Tracker Database and it was predicted to land about 20km from where I live. I was monitoring the progress until about 11:00 when the sonde altitude was less than 2km. I decided to go chasing whilst the sonde was still in the air.
I was on my own this time which makes parking a little more difficult. The predicted landing point was somewhere near Weston Patrick, near Basingstoke, so I set off to take another reading from Upton Grey, which is the village just before Weston Patrick. Monitoring whilst driving down narrow country lanes is a good way to be killed or kill someone else, so I was stopping, monitoring, driving, stopping, monitoring, etc. From Upton Grey I had a good signal with my trusty "sonde tracker in a drain pipe" but I was still a few kilometers away so I travelled further on to Weston Patrick. On reaching Weston Patrick, the roads were very narrow and safe parking places were few and far between. When I did find somewhere safe to pull off the road, the signal had gone.
The signal had vanished so quickly, I assumed someone else had recovered the sonde and switched it off. As there was no signal, I decided to abandon the search and head back home, but first I needed to find somewhere to turn around safely. After travelling a few more kilometers I pulled into a turning space to see my trusty "sonde tracker in a drain pipe" had received another packet from the sonde. It was not receiving anything at the moment but it has seen something whilst I was driving. This is why having my wife as a driver is so much easier. On the way to the turning place, I had noticed a few safe places to stop on the other side of the road so I turned around and headed back to one of those.
Once in a safe place on the other side of the road, I noticed I had received a few more packets. It was time to put on my boots and head across the fields. From the field, I was not receiving any packets so I headed to the highest point in the field. There were the stubble remains of a harvested crop so I did not have to be too careful to avoid anything. At the top of the field, I received packets and my receiver told me I was just over 1km away. I headed off on the approximate bearing towards the source of the packets.
Two fields later, and mostly up hill, I found the sonde. It was on the ground on one side of a tall tree. The tether string went all the way to the top of the tree, then down the other side to the ground, where the parachute was located. Cutting the tether on the sonde side made it easy to pull the tether through the tangle of branches and recover everything.
The field was used by livestock so I collected all the material as quickly as possible and headed back. I always feel better when I know that recovering a sonde from a field means that an animal is not going to accidentally eat it. I imagine the vet's bill for recovering a parachute and tether from the inside of a cow is quite substantial.
The track of this radio sonde is recoded on radiosondy.info.