19.06.2025

This article and probably many of the following will only be available in English.

Today I launched a HY30 balloon from Hwoyee for the first time!

And I have to say: I am impressed.

But lets start at the beginning. After I got the balloons yesterday I had to test them out and so I prepared for a launch. As I also got the club station callsign DL0HAB I used that call for the first time.

The flight used a RS41 with a single AA running RS41ng transmitting Horus V2 and APRS. I also experimented with a new dereeler Design which worked quite well, though it is quite prone to locking up. I will continue working on this design but won't go into further detaily for now.
I also wanted to try using a one way valve to fill the balloon. Initially this seemed to work very well but after some delays enough Helium seems to have gone out of the balloon that it didn't go up. All in all, this is not very practical for manual launches.
I ended up closing the balloon with an extra string which might be the reason for the rather unespected end of the launch.

After launch it rose upwards at a rate of 1m/s. This caused the ascent to take a long time as it reached a maximum altitude of 18.865m. After reaching this altitude the balloon didn't burst but slowly went down at a rate of around 0.7m/s.
This caused the flight to continue way further than expected going out of Germany. As the sun went down, the sonde cooled down to -40°C and stopped transmitting as the battery froze.
Because of this, the majority of the descent could not be tracked.