This looks like a fun first attempt. Here are a few pointers to improve your flight. Tracking: Mobile phones make bad trackers (strictly locators). They are unreliable and don’t work at all outside mobile phone coverage areas. Personal locator beacons are much more reliable. SPOT is a good one. There is also radio tracking for the more experienced and skilled in electronics. A GSM locator (like your phone) makes a good back-up. Dedicated GSM locators are better than phones. CattraQ is a good example. CAA permission – it would be good to mention this.
For your future projects I am happy to let you test fly a skyprobe flight computer which can record temperature, pressure, humidity and several other weather parameters if you like. It also has a suitable GPS receiver to show burst height and ground track. Regards Chris – Balloon News
Thanks for posting Chris and the offer of a test flight for a skyprobe
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We deliberately chose a phone/camera setup to do the test flight as cheap as possible - and to make it something that could be replicated by anyone with minimal cost.
On future flights we'll most certainly be using another type of tracking system - we've both got a raspberry pi each that we're interested using alongside a radio datalink.
Although we mention that the flight was designed for minimal engineering knowledge, we're both aerospace engineers and my own particular specialisation is in Avionics - so working on a higher end project our aim
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