Sterling VA Morning Radiosonde Launch 4 June 2018

[ChrisSmolinski]

I am back to monitoring radiosondes again, having finally gotten my new decoding app (mostly) written. It decodes the LMS6 radiosondes which Sterling switched to from the Mark IIa back in 2015.  They use 401 MHz.  Below is a map of the path as well as a graph of the elevation. The green circle is the acquisition of signal (in theory launch if I caught the entire flight, which I never do), the bursting shape is the peak altitude when the balloon burst, and the red circle is the loss of signal (in theory the landing site if I caught it, which I did not in this case).

I hope to relocate the discone antenna and get it a little higher up, which might help increase the portion of the flight I can receive. As you can see, the peak altitude is about 33,000 meters or 107,250 feet.  You can see the rapid decent at first, then it slows down as air drag increases, and finally the parachute starts to have an affect. Sometimes the flights go up this way, and then I capture more of them.

For reception I used the netSDR receiver with VHF/UHF downconverter and the Sirio discone antenna I wrote about here: https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php/topic,42993.0.html