Camera Charger

Phil needs to get the charger for our camera which, being the millionaire playboy that he is, has been left it at one of his many mansions. Assuming he picks it up this week, we can have a full system test!

Welcome back...

The more observant of you will have noticed virtually a year has gone by without so much as a peep from the team. We have busy lives. And Red Dead Redemption.

We've picked ourselves up though and are planning to launch Oct 2nd or 3rd 2010. That's two weeks to you.

The radio gear has been retested and next week there will be more tests run on the rest of the avionics package. Expect to hear more soon :-)

T minus 20 hours... and cancelled

Weather reports coming in suggest rain for most of tomorrow and possibly high winds at ground level at our launch and recovery sites. In view of this information we are now 'No go' for launch this weekend.

As I suggested in an earlier post, our launch window is likely now closed until the new year, however the additional time may allow the construction of more receivers - as the saying goes: every cloud....

Weather update from Metcheck

All eyes are on the weekend weather as there is the potential for some really quite nasty weather to sweep in off the Atlantic on Sunday as a deepening low moves across the country.

Confidence is still rather low over the exact track this system will take, which in turn will affect where the heaviest rain and strongest winds occur. As things stand at the moment, the low looks set to deepen quickly as it approaches Britain and Ireland, with a possible north-eastwards track across southern Ireland and then across northern England. This would bring the heaviest rainfall across central parts of Britain, with the strongest winds to the south and east of the low.

T minus 2 days

Another rollercoaster of a day with the weather models 00Z and 06Z models (both NOGAPS and GFS) suggesting that the nasty upper level winds out in the Atlantic would be coming over the UK just as we launch. Up at 9000 metres the indication was that wind speeds would be exceeding 100 knots! Our track was predicted to be almost 90 miles East of our launch site and to make matters worse heavy rain was also forecast.

I've just re-run the flight prediction based on the 12Z model and we have have a much more reasonable track. The rain is an unknown factor with no agreement in the models and different weather sites predicting wildly different weather. From what I can tell, cloud cover and the likely hood of rain falls as we move East - so we may be launching in cloudy skies and retrieving in clear ones.

Tomorrow is a VERY big D-day for us - fairly early on were going to have to give a 'go/no go' because we don't want to have delivery of Helium if it can't be used. So I'll be running the weather models tomorrow morning and hoping we have a consensus from the 00Z and 06Z runs.

This D-day is even bigger than that though. Our launch window is now closing due to factors such as team availability, daylight hours and weather considerations to name but a few. As such a launch between November and January is not particularly likely - so this may well be our last chance to launch in 2009.

As of this moment we are still 'GO'. Check back tomorrow to find out what D-day brings!

T minus 3 days

GFS has been giving us wildly different predictions all day with 00Z, 06Z and 12Z model runs producing very different tracks. We still don't know if there will be rain, although the wind is likely to take our balloon North Westerly.

Currently still 'GO' for launch.

Avionics: Ready for flight

Here you can see, for the first time, the full avionics package loaded into the capsule. The long copper wire along the bottom is the transmit antenna and the small block on top is the GPS antenna.