On Sep 27, 2020, at 4:14 PM, Zack Clobes W0ZC <zclobes@...> wrote:



Thanks for the photos. I've included them in the 2018 gallery.

I've had failures during other launches for sure, but the most spectacular ones seem to be in front of large groups of people. A few years ago in Hutch I was raising my balloon up on kite-string lanyards. Somehow things twisted just right and the lanyards friction-cut their way through my load line dropping the packages back to the ground and releasing the balloon towards the heavens.

The second one that I had was a remotely-controlled cutdown device placed above the parachute. It utilized a 400MHz link from the capsule to command the cutdown. The good news is that I had the presence of mind to include a deadman's switch in the event that the controlling capsule died, we'd still get cut away. The bad news is that I inadvertently shorted my receive antenna directly to ground. When I was testing on the workbench everything was fine, however as soon as I put 30' of load line out between the balloon and the capsule, I unknowingly initiated a deadman's count-down. The capsules rose a couple thousand feet into the air before descending gracefully back a few miles away.

Oh the adventures...

Zack Clobes, W0ZC
Project: Traveler
www.projecttraveler.org

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On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 1:26 PM John Kovac KM6GKF <jkovac@...> wrote:

Here’s a link to six photos from

2018.  

https://www.flickr.com/gp/johnkovac/53Tx32

Kind of a painful memory for my son and me - we drove from California to Idaho and had a line break just before launch, balloon went up with no payload and we didn’t have a spare balloon.  It was cool to meet everyone, though, and we enjoyed the presentations.

On Sep 27, 2020, at 10:57 AM, Zack Clobes W0ZC <zclobes@...> wrote:



OK, so I think 2005 was the room that started to rotate around on us then. Was that in Omaha?

Zack

On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 12:15 PM L. Paul Verhage KD4STH <nearsys@...> wrote:

I'll dig up and see what I have. Here are two updates for you though. 2009 was Topeka and not 2005. For 2001 you can write down Manhattan Kansas.

On Sun, Sep 27, 2020, 10:47 AM Zack Clobes W0ZC <zclobes@...> wrote:

I started a central photo gallery of past GPSL events. I've made it through my personal photo galleries but I have a lot of years that are completely missing. If anyone would like to share some of their photos to add to the gallery I'd love to fill in the gaps*.

Also in related news, I want to capture the hosts and locations for each year's event to give credit where credit is due. My documentation isn't that great for some of the past seasons so if anyone knows who/where/when an event was had, pass it along please.

https://www.superlaunch.org/past-events/photo-gallery

* Please understand that this isn't intended to be an all-inclusive gallery of all photos. I don't have the hosting space nor the time to handle tens-of-thousands of photos. Instead I just want to capture a highlight reel for each year.

Zack Clobes, W0ZC
Project: Traveler
www.projecttraveler.org

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