A group of Queen's students working on launching a balloon and taking pictures and telemetry approached the Kingston ARC on advice on how they could track the balloon. They came to one of our meetings and we gave them advice on what they would need to track the balloon using an APRS program and/or through the Internet.

KARC purchased a Microtrack, and ensured it was set up with correct parameters, a balloon icon, beacon of Queens Balloon, and used the KARC callsign of VE3KAR-11, and it was loaned to the group for use in their balloon.

Club members were waiting for word when they were going to launch but no word came.  One of the Club members noticed that the balloon was moving from Queen's University and many members and other Amateurs began tracking the flight of the Balloon using the Internet and/or live over the air APRS software.

The balloon was launched from the Maynooth area, and stalled near Denbeigh for some time, continued on and then stopped in New York.  

Track - Queens University to Maynooth ON (Launch Point) to  Stalled position just inside New York near Brasie Corners NY (30 March)
Street Map	Terrain Map	Satellite Map
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On Mon 31 Internet track showed the balloon still near Brasie Corners and Club members thought the balloon was on the ground or in a tree. On Tues 31 April the balloon showed up in the Adirondak Park Reserve NW of Wing Pond off the NW shore of Lake George.

Apparent Final Landing Near Lake George NY
Street Map	Terrain Map	Satellite Map
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It was noticed that the balloon was being shown back at Queen's University Wed afternoon on 2 April.

Locations shown on this page have been extrapolated from APRS maps and/or raw data that was listed on the internet for raw positional data.

3 April 2008
Les, VE3KFS, via email posted on our list:, received an email from the group, saying they had forgotten the phone numbers and we were all invited to the presentation at Queens on 4 April.

Quote from Rob's (Queens) email:
"If you've been watching the balloon online you probably saw it landed south of the border. Just as we were leaving to retreive it we checked once more and it had moved deep into the Adirondacks. How it did this is completely unexplained. Presumably the balloon would have popped upon the first landing where it transmitted for 3 hours after landing.

Evan and myself (this is Robbie typing) drove down 6 hours, hiked another 2 into the mountains and found the balloon against what I think are incredible odds. We have your transmitter and 627 incredible photos safe back in kingston. If you can't make it tomorrow we can get everything back to you along with a DVD of the pictures and movies from the launch and flight at your convinience. We updated the transmission frequency to once every 21s. As expected the gps stopped working at 20km and we lost contact for awhile. By some miracle the transmitter powered back on once it had moved down to the Adirondacks which allowed us to find everything. Big learning experience for all of us."

4 April 2008
Steve, VE3KC, Phil, VE3HST, and Drew, VE3UIN,  attended the presentation.

From Steve, VE3KC,  via email posted on our list:
"Drew, Phil and I attended the High Altitude Balloon presentation this afternoon. I'll leave it to Drew and Phil to describe the video portion of the presentation, but aurally, they did a good job. We and Barry were mentioned several times, thanked for our help and included in their acknowledgements. I think I have a better appreciation as to why they didn't tell us about the launch. They had lots of last minute problems which they described during their presentation. 
Following the presentation, they were asked several questions by the students and faculty who were present. The auditorium was full. I have our equipment."

From Phil, VE3HST,  via email posted on our list:
"I was quite impressed with the presentation and with the whole balloon project. Due to weight limitations, they were not able to carry all the instrumentation they planned. But their camera worked beautifully. I'm sure we will get a copy of their many photos (something like 850 MB worth). They got photos all the way up. An early one shows the launch site and the launchers. They have photos all the way up to an estimated 28 km altitude. Very good quality photos. A 4-engine aircraft passed well below them and they got a great photo of the contrail and a reasonable photo of the aircraft. All the photos are downward. They had planned to move the camera to the horizon, to the balloon and to the sky but that was cut from the project. If I understood correctly, they have good photos of the St Lawrence and Hill Island from a very high altitude. They believe the maximum altitude was 32 km, but the camera apparently froze up before that in the estimated -50C temperature.

The recovery was achieved after a 6 hour drive to the other side of Adirondack Park, NY, and a 2 km trek in cold rain and 5 ft of snow. They used snow shoes until the mountainous climb became too steep. Eventually their GPS brought them directly to the balloon GPS position. The balloon was wrapped around a tree and the instrument package was completely intact with no damage. They reached it just before dark. Total ground distance covered by the balloon was about 400 km."

Queens' High Altitude Balloon  Phys 450, April 11, 2008 Report in PDF Format (853 kb)

Having walked on some of the easier parts of the Adirondack Park in warmer, drier, and easier conditions, I can appreciate the effort made by these guys to retrieve the experiment at this time of year. Anyone who has even done just the final climb to the top of Whiteface Mountain observation point has seen some of the cross country terrain. (Chip, VA3KGB) 

More to follow!