it's a category 2 hurricane out here did the Western eye come ashore yes it did it came right across right down over top of us right there there is the hurricane landfall project truck it's all set up strapped down we're going to turn all the switches on in just a little while standing outside of the Chevy Tahoe we are getting into the eye wall of hurricane Jean right now core came in on Shore here along the Southeast coast of these little bullet cams right here that we will use to record that [Music] surge hello again and welcome to another edition of stories from the hurricane highway I'm your host here Mark suth great to have you listening in got a great episode here for you going to talk about Herby once again the hurricane research balloon we did a test in 2014 didn't do anything in 2013 with it so it was time to test again so I'm going to tell you all about that was going to have my good friend and colleague Paul Bowman join me but at the time I'm recording this he is sick everybody's sick lately it's annoying not you know you know what I mean like for everybody it's really I was sick at the end of October some weird upper respiratory thing that's October of 23 depending on when you listen to this and then I got the flu near Thanksgiving yeah it's just yuck anyway so we're going to have to do this without Paul at least um with his voice
and his his side of the story but that's fine I can tell you all about what he did and how he contributed because he did he was there for the um the first test of a new generation of Herby and I'll discuss what that means as we go forward all right so we're going to miss Paul miss having him on this episode but hey sickness happens and if you can't talk and you don't feel good I understand it's the way it goes um that's what I'm here for to tell these stories for you as best I can we'll get Paul back on eventually though because he shows up later on down the road in this metaphoric hurricane Highway series all right so let's just um real quick I want to remember something later that whole easy way out of when I forgot something I didn't really forget anything but I I learned by looking back through some pict pictures from my iPhone I think I had an iPhone 4 to
start that was in 2012 and I had it a few years I think up to maybe 2015 that's neither here nor there but the iPhone saves pictures as you know it's got storage Androids do it too and one thing that I did and have
done ever since I had an iPhone is I would save the contents of the iPhone onto my computer onto portable hard drives for posterity right for archival
purposes screenshots videos pictures Graphics that I might have downloaded anything that was on those iPhones I would save it I got all these files and all these folders I've put a lot of them on my Dropbox for Hurricane track and uh it's just a great way to remember things because boy we got almost a half a million miles to cover here if not more through this series and that's just to get us caught up to the current year so to speak but anyway so my point being with all that uh on the iPhone from way back in 2014 I happen to have a picture I took one picture when I went to the weather channel for that big meeting where it looked like they were going to offer me a deal you know the big pitch meeting as it were to meet the president David Clark and others that date because here's the cool thing the iPhone tags the pictures with metadata and that metadata includes the time the location all kinds of stuff and so it tells me that at 4:23 p.m. on April 25th 2014 that's when I took the picture
at the headquarters of The Weather Channel so that is picture number number one for this episode all right and I hope that as you have listened to these last few episodes that you have been looking at these pictures either on Discord or you can go to patreon where I post them as well as attachments because I'm going to keep doing that I think it's just a nice way to fill in and hopefully add some value to this um some context I just think it's neat because I might refer to an image or a picture and many times because of the iPhone and it's archival methods and the fact that I saved all these pictures and videos there they are so be uh be sure to check that out picture number one the front of the Weather Channel over near Atlanta Georgia it's on the north side of Atlanta what is it in Marietta or something like that anyhow that was April 25th so we go on and we did that big um hurricane Workshop thing in
Houston and we're getting now to the 1 of June hurricane season is here and Carrie and I are very excited at this point in time because we want to do another test of Herby the hurricane research balloon now let me give yo some backstory again just to remind yo cuz again we did nothing with it in 2013 so the first iteration the first
build of Herby as Carrie and I discussed it in 2011 throughout the months getting into 2012 worked with Paul talking about it Tim malar Carrie me and we all came up with this idea Jesse of course had his input I figured why don't I build it out of a styrofoam cooler it was exactly $238 I say exactly I'm pretty sure that's what it was at Walmart and um I
wrapped it in Gorilla tape and uh that gave it some extra like yo
know gorilla tape's almost indestructible so it gave it some extra framing or whatever some strength right and um you we had these dowels that went through it and remember I had no engineering no design whatever a lot of this stuff is just let's see what happens it's like Elon Musk without the billions of dollars but you know and as hyperbolic as that sounds wow Mark's comparing himself to Elon look it is true true that Innovation you can throw a lot of money at it you can try to do everything in computer modeling CAD drawings and and I think that's a lot of what NASA does and that's fine but the way musk has done things you know controversial as they may be with SpaceX um you got to try and sometimes stuff works sometimes it doesn't and as long as everybody stays safe and there's no Shenanigans hey whatever trial and error works uh Benjamin Franklin with the light bulb wasn't it like lots and lots of times and he finally got it right there's some quote about that if I'm not mistaken in that movie National Treasure with Nicholas Cage I think that's where they mentioned it but whatever I'm off on a crazy tangent here but the the point is you do not have to be an engineer to engineer something it's fine you know as long as again it doesn't harm people and whatnot right so so my Herby design as you know non-traditional as it looked
it worked that first payload was probably close to 6 lbs huge styrofoam cooler I say huge I mean compared to where we were going to go and where we are today it was large so the first Herby again styrofoam cooler it had wooden dowels that went through that made it like a basket that I would drill holes into the side like the ends and he would put these cords on the string if you will the um I think it was uh like 400 lb rated uh cord you know you buy it
at Low's it's 100 ft long and I made it into a basket so it looked like yo could hang this basket and that was the first generation of Herby the Jagger project that I did with CNN that was the exact same design so it worked you know and whatever so as we got through 2013 we didn't do anything with testing but we were thinking about a better design of the payload and Carrie had
done his research of course and found a company and this is really important uh that was making an aprs
transmitter and data collector and the company High altit science had this wonderful little piece of technology and I'm going to put a picture of this as well for you called the uh Eagle flight computer or flight Eagle I think it's the Eagle flight computer and it was couple 100 bucks and it was an aprs transmitter it went out to something called a radio bug which was a specific aprs they made it I think
um this company uh scientists and engineers and electronics gurus and it would transmit over a quarter watt that's it uh the aprs signal from car's aprs sign he was a
e5jy and then you would have a dash and
then some other number I think it was like 1 through 16 or something and I think we were like we chose six for Herby and it's all in the amateur radio side of things I didn't have an amateur radio license at the time so we used carries so instead of putting a large radio in there which would transmit aprs data thing weighs a pound and a half or this little small microt track that was an aprs transmitter it looked like uh a sunglasses case we tried that in 2012 with the Jager project we always want to get the weight down get the size smaller everything and so we basically just yo know have a case and a couple GoPros on
there and minimal everything else so this little flight Eagle computer weighed I don't know an ounce or two it was incredible and then we had the spot locator and uh that was the satellite tracker and that only works to 30,000 ft 29,000 whatever you know whatever Mount Everest is 29,028 Ft something like that it's recreational but here's the thing the Eagle flight computer uh from high altitude science had a GPS chip chip that was unlocked so it would operate and collect GPS dat GPS data and transmit that data through this
radio bug aprs antenna thing all the way to 250,000 ft that's more than enough if we
could clear 100,000 ft we would be very very happy happy that's usually the goal for most high altitude balloon enthusiasts and there were quite a few people around the world doing high altitude ballooning for various reasons photography experiments high schools were doing it spaceweather.com Dr Tony Phillips there is a ongoing high altitude balloon experiment called Earth to Sky calculus I believe that's the name and they do high altitude ballooning you know collecting proton information in the upper atmosphere all kinds of exciting stuff so ha or high high altitude ballooning not a unique concept to what we were doing there's quite a few people around the globe that are doing it you have to have a few uh
procedures in place yes anybody could theoretically go out build a payload get a helium balloon from a manufacturer like kont or something get a helium tank and launch a balloon you can put your iPhone in there and they've made a couple commercials about that that I remembered seeing where somebody had some rewards point from a Chase credit card or something and they used it to launch a small payload with a phone in there well the FCC doesn't want you to do that you need to have an amateur license but I mean anybody could do it you know whatever you just might have to talk to the FAA or the FCC so we followed all the rules we got car's um call sign programmed into the High Altitude computer this little chip thing and again I'll post a picture of it that's picture number two you can check it out it's uh very small very lightweight and uh so there would be that it had now here's the other part it had the capability to take a little micro SD card that would record data and
that's real you know all this is cumulative here we're building a better Herby the first first test in 2012 proved that it worked even with the semi failed eager project with CNN it still worked we got our payload back and we learned stuff the other thing about the High Altitude science realm all the stuff they offer they also had a little um sensor probe that you could plug in to the High Altitude computer the Eagle flight computer had a little slot where he could plug a little um sensor thing in it's like a wire then had a little probe in the probe did temperature and humidity and that would be awesome now we can have uh readings from the surface of the Earth to the edge of space and the GPS data would help us with the air pressure yo know like an altimeter and all this would be logged onto that chip every 6 seconds that's
not bad that's a pretty good sample rate now drop on from the hurricane Hunters are way more um the sample rate is a lot higher I think it's every half second if I'm not mistaken maybe more frequently now I don't know but every 6 seconds I would take it the aprs transmitter itself would send Telemetry data from the payload every 2 minutes now we can get it down every 1 minute but every 2 minutes and then the spot locator would just tell us it's lat long very basic information every 5 minutes and it would work like I said to roughly 30,000 ft so
that's all the hardware all the cool gadgetry for Herby part or version two what are we going to put it in well I was like well why don't we put it in one of the Pelican cases Carrie was like yeah that'll work so we ordered a small IM 275 case let me click on this picture because there's a picture of it I want to make sure that's EX exactly which one it was of course the picture is blurry I'm almost sure that it's an IM 275 because that's what we're using even today to put GoPro cams in we've got some other ones we use as well we'll get to that later that's in 2015 but anyway it's a black IM 2075 Pelican case oh there's another picture of it there on the back of uh K's tailgate from his pickup and yes it is the IM 2075 that's what I thought I'll put that as picture number three for you so anyway it's all going to go all this equipment in the IM 2075
case and um the two GoPros would be on
the case and we put little connectors so one GoPro would look basically straight up at the balloon the other GoPro would look down at an angle not straight down but out out at a kind of an angle I don't know 30° angle down towards the Earth two gpros was plenty the first hery had four that was Overkill yeah it's nice but it's more weight more whatever two is enough one would look at the balloon straight up the launch cord
and You' see the balloon and see it burst that's a big thing in high altitude ballooning people like to watch the balloons burst at what we call burst altitude when it reaches the low pressure of the upper atmosphere the balloon finally can't take it anymore and it pops the payload comes to Earth via parachute the aprs and the spot locator tell us generally where it is within a mile maybe less if we're lucky and then we go out with car's truck and his handheld radio and his truck mounted radio tells us where it is we get the lat long we go pick it up easy right so that's all in concept I want to make the testing easy you know again it
tells you where it is it's like a falling geocache if you know what geocaching is and you know you got to do
it somewhere where it's easy to pick up so Eastern uh us areas too many trees I
could test it here in eastern North Carolina might fall in the ocean there's lots of water around here whatever trees Galore not so much in the nation's midsection so that's why I decided let's
test in Ardmore Oklahoma on June the 2nd
[Music]
2014 all right back with you here on stories from the hurricane Highway talking about the next test of Herby the
official test of Herby we're going to do it on June 2nd 2014 I chose Ardmore Oklahoma to test our new payload version two of Herby this hardened Pelican case
and it's got the two GoPros the flight Eagle computer or E Eagle flight whatever it's called um and it's got that little Probe on there again look at picture number three you'll see a nice photo of it on the back of car's uh tailgate of his Ford truck and um that little probe sticks out and that measures temperature and humidity I think dupoint as well well you know the computer will do that with the temperature and the humidity readings and whatnot and of course internally the chip would record GPS data and the aprs The Weather Bug would transmit it out and we were all set now one thing that we did do after the launch in 2012 um I knew that I wanted this project to continue I knew that it was expensive helium is expensive and you know we're in the age of Twitter and whatnot uh pretty substantially in 2014 and I've got my YouTube channel which was you know okay I think it had I don't know maybe a thousand followers on YouTube subscribers back in 14 which that's a story for another day that's entirely my fault it should have been a million but I didn't really know what I had you know working on it now but anyway um but through social media and through the hurricane track site I crowdfunded I don't know a couple thousand dollar through selling these little tiles they were little small I don't remember whose idea it was it was one of our partners ideas one of our supporters they said you know how yo can buy a brick at Disney World and they'll put your name on it the suth family we've never done that but we we did at our kids' school they go to a school here a private school here in Wilmington and and we got all their names on there it's like $500 a brick or something and people do this often when they want to raise money for any kind of project so I thought let's do this and except being bricks it'll be these little plastic tiles that weigh I don't
know two or three grams each very small 2 in wide an inch um tall and you know whatever quarter inch thick and I got somebody to make them locally and I sold them 100 bucks a I would send it to you you sign it and I think I even included a Sharpie if I'm not mistaken um and you send it back and uh
you're part of History so I sold uh let's see how many of them there's I got a picture of that as well where' it go where's that picture I know I had it cuz I saw it earlier oh it's on Twitter that's right I was trying to punch all this up from the iPhone archives but I've also got some stuff sitting over on Twitter all right so let's see we had 1 two three by 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 24 so
$2,400 uh maybe a little bit more than that cuz sometimes a family did it and so they would include a couple extra $100 or whatever and um yeah we had uh 24 of
these things these little tiles that'll be picture number four for you I've still got them uh by the way they're still in my garage SL laab yes they are
um and so these would go in the bottom of the payload I mean they weigh next to nothing and they would go up with the payload and this would be the first time this test that I would do that and I was very excited about it so I tweeted a picture about it this is June 2nd and um that was just a really neat thing so we had crowd funded some funds to pay for
some of this the helium's expensive traveling is expensive and you know had to buy the case I didn't want Carrie to have to fund everything um and I didn't quite yet have my first money from The Weather Channel that would come later it's a big company it took a little while that came I think in July or something like that we'll get there but anyway that's the story of these little tiles and like I said I still have them in the garage waiting for the first time that we do this in the daytime key there daytime in the eye of a hurricane not just a test um so armore Oklahoma why there I
wanted it to be in the midwest generally it's flat yes there's some rolling planes out there generally way less trees and generally a lot less water and
easy to get around you got I35 if you go far enough North you got I70 if you're in Kansas and then everything else is a grid for the most part north south east west generally paved roads dirt roads are okay especially when it's dry and it's easy to get around so I wanted the testing to be simple stressfree let's make sure the
technology works that was the idea let's do the testing as easy as we can make sure everything works make recovery easy because we know I knew that in a hurricane it is going to be extremely stressful extremely difficult a clock will be ticking when we get in the calm of the eye to prepare it launch it and then take cover so that the eyew wall from the other side doesn't roll us up you know so the testing must be easy
and I think that makes a lot of sense so I thought let's do it in the midwest that's why and we've done it in the Midwest every time ever since the first test was in Texas this was going to be Ardmore Oklahoma I don't know specifically why Ardmore it's up on 35 North of Dallas we picked Paul up at the airport on June 1st in Dallas he flew in from Nevada and it was him me Carrie and off
we went and I believe we were just in car's truck uh his Ford was it a Ford Ranger he had was a pickup truck I don't believe it was an F-150 but nevertheless picked up Paul
got up there and uh we were ready to go June 2nd would be the launch day we filed a notam the notice to Airman uh through some phone number that we had figured out whenever important to do um so you you tell them
uh you know the launch time the expected uh part of the atmosphere it's going to go through what it is how much it weighs and the person on the other end of the phone you call like Lockheed Martin or something like that and I think you can do stuff online now but um and then they put it in the system and that way when yo launch uh you know if something were go
wrong billion to one odds hopefully uh or you know even if a pilot sees the payload go by and hey I just saw something really weird um the notam is there so that it's it's got some paperwork and what have you so we filed the notem we were ready to go and we were going to do it in the afternoon of June the 2nd now interesting around that time on the 1st uh I guess Phil kpot and Colorado State University put out their updated forecast for the hurricane season just so you know and it was upu a little bit and they were looking at 10 named storms 10 named storms and I know I got it in here somewhere um let's see when did he issue that this is the first we filed our notam on the first and then we get to the second let's see when yeah right there June 2nd um 10 name storms four hurricanes and one just one major that was on June 2nd
Colorado State slightly raises their forecast that was a tweet that I had made now the other thing that we were going to do is stream live from the Logitech from the vehicle it' be the everywhere Cam and that was really important to me because it was just more testing of this technology and the the one part about that that I was really hyping up as especially on our back end our supporter side you know you guys some of it some of you from were from then you might remember this our premium site or whatever I was calling it back then um and I might have even made it public who knows but the everywhere Cam that little Logitech Broadcaster again it had a 2hour battery the hotspot couple hour battery little Verizon hotspot Paul after helping get everything ready he would help to just kind of follow us along in the recovery process so you see where it lands we get out we go get it Paul would bring us live you know he'd be the camera guy put the hot spot in his pocket hold the Logitech in his hands and off we go that was kind of part of his job on the recovery side I was very excited about that I thought you know this would be the first time in history you know big deal I don't know to me it was that someone would be streaming live the recovery of a weather balloon uh yo know weather balloon high altitude balloon recovery whatever right and I just thought that was neat it and it was it was geeky I just thought it was cool we were going to be able to do that and we also had some live video coming from the Drone my Quadcopter we had that iPhone on there that iPhone SE that's how we did that and I don't remember if that worked or not but I think we attempted it so we get out there in the uh early afternoon we had scoped out some areas where we could launch around ardore and we chose a baseball park a municipal recreational park on the north side of the city pretty close to I35 in
fact what are we up to picture four or five something like that I will put um
I'll put these images on there the aprs information I guess Carrie had his laptop up and he would send these to me cuz I've got screenshots as it was happening uh so anyway we chose this park and it was kind of breezy and we get out there it's in the afternoon just a little bit after 12 really literally afternoon and we're pretty much ready to go um let's see I tweeted Herby is away
now for the Chase and that was at 12:19 p.m. central Time from Oklahoma that was really cool so Herby goes up and the
aprs transmitter is doing great and the APR uh the uh spot locator also chiming in and that does so even on the ground so everything's working great got these two GoPros running off everything goes so we're waiting we're going to wait a few minutes you know again the anticipation is hopefully it makes it up to 100,000 ft burst come back down wherever and we go get it and and so we pack everything up put the helium tank back in pack up car's truck and we're kind of waiting and we drive out uh to the interstate go south just a little bit and we're kind of keeping track of it and I'm just going to look at some of these uh screenshots that I had posted so it's uh the information's coming in in um metric so it's at 4600 M or about
12,000 ft roughly and let's see if it has some the so I guess in this particular data set it was not for some
reason transmitting the weather data that's weird I don't know why because I know eventually it does because I've got some pictures of it but anyway it's got that weather data from that little probe that we had on there um why it wasn't transmitting that at the time I don't know maybe we weren't using the radio bug just yet memory I
try but we were certainly transmitting the information back I just don't remember what the antenna was and the radio bug might have been what we needed maybe that came in 2015 cuz I'm looking at the picture here and it's got the Telemetry info minus the weather data but we know we had a probe on there and it was collecting weather data it just wasn't getting sent back for some reason but that's okay so it goes on up and we're tracking it and noticed that it
was like uh let's see here now I guess Carrie changed something in his settings cuz now it's reporting in in feet so that's good um it's uh at 32,000 ft and
I guess it's 11:39 um central time that we did this must have been that we launched 12:19 eastern time whatever these are just little yeah that's right because it says 12:40 p.m. on my tweet but the information coming in here says 11:39 I don't know whatever I'm just reading stuff to you telling you the story here it's working pretty good but something weird started happening I was like all right it's not really transmitting like we thought and it doesn't seem to really be um gaining the altitude that we were hoping like it's moving East uh from I35 near the park where we launched it and I thought you know is it coming back down is something wrong like I started having a little bit of a not a panic attack but I was like uh-oh something seems to be seems to be off there's just a little bit of a window there where it wasn't chiming in and some of the information was weird said it was moving at 58 miles an hour yo know I guess that's laterally it's like what and so it's just nerve-wracking because we're not used to this yet uh but I'm gonna post a bunch of these screenshots for you so you can kind of follow along it is really neat because it'll tell you the lat long of the thing and by the way it was a ae5 j y-9 for the balloon and then ae5 J
y-10 for car's Truck those were the call
signs and the little addendums on there to identify is a weather balloon the other was his vehicle and both of these
were getting plotted on the map it was really cool even back in 2014 so be sure to check out these images all right so we go along Herby keeps rising and it's just working great as far as we can tell uh looking at here the next one um it's uh 1:07 p.m. so it's a little bit afternoon um central time and it is at
59,000 ft that's getting it it's doing great and we're not far from it you know car's truck you can see it on this image here if you look at these images where you see his truck um it's right there on the highway looks like Highway 70 out there and uh we're only a couple miles away from it so we're not far from it at all it has an outrun us so that's good and of course it'd be cool if we could see it come down after it burst that was always uh sort of a fun thing to hope for but it's doing great and I even mentioned that as was like uh yeah doing great that's what I tweeted cannot wait to examine weather weather data from this so I guess it was not transmitting weather data in 2014 good to remember we would have to get that radio bug uh we must have had just a regular antenna that would send out the aprs data but it didn't get the data from uh the little
Probe on there for whatever reason what we'll figure that out in the next uh when we get to 2015 cuz that's when we started doing live weather data if memory serves anyhow going along it's it's doing great next screenshot it's at 76,000 ft by the way the top of a hurricane eh 40 45 50,000 ft and the most intense one you think about the thickness of it the very top big cumula nimbus clouds around the eyewall maybe 50,000 ft especially out over the ocean if they are intensifying those big updrafts when they're approaching land again 40 45,000 ft something like that at 76,000 ft we're looking down 30,000 ft to that hurricane that's what I was visioning and you can understand why I was so excited about this so this test was important because now this thing's doing fantastic it's way up at 76,000 ft it's just going great moving 21 mph a heck of a view it must have it's interesting though looking at at the track it had been going you know East or whatever then it turned around it was headed back and there's this Lake over there uh hard for me to figure out let me look at the Google Maps real quick CU these are some old low res images on Twitter archives Ardmore Oklahoma come on arore there it is this is what that Lake was called cuz I was worried yeah Lake Murray and there's a state Park it's a big lake here I was like oh there's not as much water out there well there's this big old Lake uh sitting out there Reservoir I'm assuming and it looked like it was headed towards the lake I was like you got to be kidding me no way it's at 76,000 ft so it's got some time until burst altitude um so it goes on up I stopped
posting uh screenshots for whatever reason and um yeah so it says uh I guess we could probably deduce right here this was at 12:44 so it was up for about an hour uh the Tweet is at 1:44 but I'm assuming that's going Eastern Time neither here nor there but it's up a little over an hour and um I said that
aprs has stopped talking to us waiting now for spot to kick in and tell us where Herby is uh spot locator shows it's on the ground that was 1:59 p.m. so so almost 12:59 p.m.
central so the other it's about almost 15 minutes later and um we saw that it was on the ground the spot locator because it's below 30,000 ft it did its thing says I am here you know pops up on the spot locator app and I said here we go time to go get Herby from the woods now it had landed not far from that Lake and it looked like it was in some trees you know looking at the Google Earth it's like uhoh so off we go kind of excited you know okay it worked it went up it came down we didn't have data somewhere towards the end of everything because typically what happens as we've learned I will throw this at you culminating all the launches we've ever done once it reaches burst altitude there's a lot of chaos the thing humbles and often times that aprs just can't get a good get a good lock with GPS and you will have a data void
period sometimes you do sometimes yo don't that's what we would learn again in subsequent launches so that was a little worrisome that we didn't have aprs data for a few minutes but spot locator did its thing hey I'm over here it was really easy you just got to go get it real easy or so I
thought
[Music]
all right as we continue this episode of stories from the hurricane Highway time to go pick up the Herby payload after a successful launch near Ardmore Oklahoma it went up first altitude happened and it came down spot locator told us where it was and I mean folks it tells yo latitude longitude several decimal places out you just got to go find it so we went out not far from Lake Murray and we had car's truck and it had that big antenna on there and he picks up the signal and the signal is exactly where it is the spot locator can be but
sometimes it might have um drifted or something and maybe it fell upside down because the spot locator is chiming in every five minutes and it gives you a good idea you want a lot of reports you know after it lands so sometimes my point is the spot locator and the aprs transmitter they line up but sometimes you don't get a uh an aprs Beacon cuz it's just hidden too low in the ground you know that the signal just doesn't come out or maybe the battery popped out of the thing who knows there's always problems waiting to happen Murphy's law but in this situation the spot locator and the aprs gift wrapped exactly where it would be and we knew it was in some woods so we go on this dirt road I remember this vividly and we're very excited like all right we're streaming live on that Logitech people are watching they're commenting on the C boox chat I'm talking about it on Twitter and we head out there on this dirt road to the edge of these woods and it's basically perpendicular from where we stopped yo know cuz I'm looking at the lat long stuff and I'm trying to match everything up and I'm like all right stop stop it looks like it's you know to the right through those woods couple hundred yards in you know the lake is farther away it's not in the lake we knew that but it's between us and this lake Lake Murray so now you got to understand it's
June June 2nd you're in Oklahoma yo don't just go running into the woods oh let's go get it I'm so excited because snakes spider whatever especially the snakes especially the rattlesnakes is there any other snakes in Oklahoma probably but yes so we had to be careful and uh Carrie had a walking stick and he
would use that to kind of beat the ground he had a machete with him and he had from 2012 and just his preparedness his his boy scout mentality uh always be prepared these um
snake uh like shinguard things so he led the way and uh you know we're all wearing shorts and sneakers and whatever but he had these snake blocker they're they're like you buy them from sporting good places or whatever and they keep you know if yo get a snake bite on your lower leg it deflects it and they can't go through it um so he had those on and we went in to the woods and it didn't take long and uh he's got the handheld radio at this point and it makes that very distinct
sound there it is and that's what we were trying to find I love that sound and that sound means that there is data when it's a complete sound when you get the whole message not a message fragment remember that from Crimson Tide it's a message fragment anyway um when you get the complete message from aprs on the handheld it gives you the lat long and it tells you how far away you are in feet and the bearing you're you know it's 120° and it's 300 feet out 200 feet out 30 ft away whatever the case may be and then you should start to see it once you get about 30 ft away or 100 feet sometimes you should be able to see it now because the payload was black and it's in these trees probably we figured it was hanging in a tree it's heavy it's coming in 20 30 m an hour it might have penetrated the leaf C canopy and and landed on the forest floor but more likely than not with that pretty long cord and the parachute and maybe there's some balloon left probably got hung up in a tree how high up that was going to be the question so we hear it squawking we know where it is we just got to go get it so we narrow it down we look around and it was Paul who spotted it oh there it is right up there it was just hanging and we had put some silver like tape on it um like it's not aluminum it's like silver wrapping tape that you put on duct work because we wanted it to be more reflective it was like metal tape if you will and um we read somewhere that that helps radar see it or something like that that's not necessarily something we have to do I don't remember why we did but we were very very very cautious cuz with a new payload it's hard you know that case Pelican case it's hard plastic you know so anyway we wrapped it in some of this silver it's almost like tenf foil so that helped to make it show up a little bit because otherwise the black case it didn't stand out that much but there it was it was about 40t up hanging from some pretty good branches and I was like um what do we do and Carrie's like I got it I'll be right back so he leaves and he comes back this guy I tell you he's got this long 40 something something foot fiberglass pole that he had put together it's telescoping or whatever or interlocking whatever it is and I guess he uses it in electrical work and it's got a hook at the end and it doesn't weigh a lot but it's definitely long and kind of flexible and he's strong dude and uh he lifted it up there and just at the top of his reach made it to the payload and grabbed part of it maybe some of the cords whatever it's able to wrestle with it Paul is streaming all of this from the Logitech he's holding it I'm filming some with my iPhone and what I want to do now is play you some of that video well the audio obviously and this is what it sounded like in those woods near Lake Murray not too far from Ardmore Oklahoma as we tried to recover the payload that's you need that's all need then I can slide us back into it a little bit like that
oh now she give me a little tension yeah I just pull like a mother come off the hook I can't what do you need to I don't know am I locked on this one no you're not no okay all right watch out I lift it oh
mind this going looks so cool from the GoPros so there we were three grown men grunting around in the woods trying to rip this thing out of the tree carry with this long pole and it was exciting Paul's filming everything or streaming everything from the Logitech and um I was like you I really hope we can get this thing down and carry wasn't going to give up he's like I'll climb that thing if I have to and he would have trust me so he wrestles with it he's able to pull it down and it was very exciting uh here's the clip of that Bab Come to Papa baby beautiful I got you there you are there you are the man Herby we got it Carrie well done sir
take a b got everything first ever balloon recovery on live streaming video has to be that's
awesome oh oh sensor sensor I just rolled over on you okay good well that GoPro isn't recording so they probably ran out that's right and we got it back we got it it was so exciting it really was it was just just a wonderful feeling of completion you know we put all this together we put all this effort into it told the world about it the world yo know what I mean My Little World a lot of people are tuning in and watching and they're curious and it worked you this is the third one that we got the payload back the first Herby launch the Jagger took a few months but we got that pay payload back in Georgia now this in Ardmore Oklahoma in vicinity it's the third success and it was really neat now we
needed to see what the GoPros got cuz those were recording hopefully right so we took everything out of the woods got back into car's uh truck and we left and
we went back down to uh into Texas to Denton and we went to an Outback I believe believe it was probably knowing me and us uh we all like Outback and we got a table in there nice round table Booth table whatever and um brought the laptop in brought Herby in took the chips out one thing that's really interesting about this the GoPros they almost vacuum seal shut because the uh lack of air you know
you close them they're airtight but whatever air molecules are still in there they get sucked out in that low pressure and it's really hard to open the cases uh and also I do remember this
this was the first time that we would put these anti-fog inserts into the GoPro cases we learned from the two
launches before uh the first hery and the jger launch that any moisture at all inside the case would freeze over and that was just no bueno can't help what's happening outside but usually that evaporates once you get to those low temperatures and the no moisture content of the upper atmosphere but internal moisture you can get ice you know Frost whatever and it fogs it up it's terrible so GoPro has these anti-fog inserts for divers and they work as it turns out and preventing any moisture in there from whatever because it sucks that moisture out so the night before we launched yo know so the night of June 1st I loaded the GoPros up with these inserts sealed them in the hotel room so all that moisture got Wicked or sucked into these little looks like little sticks of gum very small sticks of gum and it pulls that moisture out you don't have yo don't have the fogging up and the icing so we opened these up took some effort had the laptop in there my Sony VIO and we looked at the footage and it was remarkable I mean just remarkable I made a video of it put it on YouTube a little Montage we got the chip from the eagle computer and we learned finally we knew exactly what the altitude was we made it to a peak of 97,500 Ft before the pay the payload burst we had temperatures as low as -60°
C and you know at the ground it was like 88 fahit you when we launched andus 20
celsus uh at burst I remember some of these stats and it was just remarkable and I posted several pictures from all of this on Twitter I'll capture those here and post those for you as well and again I certainly encourage you to look at these pictures because they really do help to round everything out and give you more context we saw the burst because the camera was looking up one of them that was really neat to see that balloon burst and the helium escaping into the atmosphere and then there's a really neat shot where we're looking down on the earth and I even said that I was like love this planet exclamation mark and uh it it was just tremendous you know all right this works we were very excited about it just Cloud n right like wow all right so that was it it was you know the second official Herby test
and everything worked the only things that weren't perfect I learned that the um the batteries would get cold in the GoPro and they kind of ran out 20 minutes before they land the the thing landed so we got the Ascension the burst and some of the Descent back to Earth but about 20 minutes before the landing into the tree in other words we didn't get to see the tree it's like ah darn it uh the batteries ran out just the way it goes they're not they're like 1,500 milliamp hour batteries 1 12200 something like that very small batteries you know they're they're just not meant to to be that cold and uh you know last for hours
it's just the way it goes nevertheless it all worked out wonderful it was
18.480 ft above a hurricane that would
be incredible to see and that's what really really kept me going all right this is going to work it really really will be amazing so we did it we uh
finished that wrapped everything up for the workshop in Houston uh you my Weather Channel deal everything was ready to go we had a great Herby test took Paul back to the airport I think might have we might have put him on an earlier flight that day all right Paul we're done cuz I think we built in an extra day in case Herby landed somewhere difficult to get to so we're like yeah let's just change things around and get you home earlier thanks buddy and off we went took him back to DFW Carrie and I went back down to Houston and uh I flew home you know probably June 3rd or 4th something like that and now we're ready for Hurricane Season you know that's it we're ready and I figured all right right it's probably going to be a littleit little bit below average but I got the Weather Channel and that's going to be fantastic going to do a lot with them got this new Logitech project we got the drifting surge cam still got a couple of the old bullet cam you know generation to yo know Herby the quadcopter like let's go let's do it I'm ready and as it turns out we'd get started sooner rather than later and that my friends will be covered in the next episode of stories from the hurricane Highway all right yes and that one I don't care if we have to wait a few weeks if he's sick or something Jesse Good Old Jessie bass he will be my guest for sure uh as I said it's yo know Paul I wanted to get this episode done he was sick I don't want to wait too long and have big gaps when these are put out and I had to get moving but for for this next one uh and I'll tell you we're going to cover hurricane Arthur you know and it's a great story and I look forward to having Jesse on to help me with that cuz oh man it was just one of those I I will never forget Arthur so we'll do that we'll do that in the next episode of the podcast all right hey look as always thank you for tuning in you know what I'm going to say I always appreciate it I I love it very much that you give me the time of day that you listen that you comment and uh hopefully you're looking at those pictures too cuz I think that helps to round things out and make it more interesting right absolutely all right well that is it from me for now thanks for tuning in to stories from the hurricane Highway again I'm your host Mark suth I'll talk to you again as soon as I [Music]
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