This was a charity flight by Matt Downs to raise money for the Cats Protection League and Essex Air Ambulance. I offered to help out with launching and chasing with Matt and flew a cheapo R3 board as backup. Matt’s tracker worked perfectly and got some great stills from the gopro camera. However cheapo hit a bug at about 12km altitude and started giving incorrect GPS coordinates. The current theory is that the 808 camera I (stupidly) attached to the tracker in an effort to catch the burst, caused interference with the GPS. This caused the GPS to reset, taking it out of flight mode and defaulting back into pedestrian mode.

We were in the paper!

Filling the 1600g balloon.

Letting it up.

Running with the payload to launch.

Easy recovery! Trailed out along the pavement.