Today was the third research flight. There were no sonde failures while loading the launcher today, which is much better. There was one sonde that had a loose screw on the parachute cap, so I left that one aside until the sea container/toolkit arrives.
During the flight, AVAPS gave the error “31 - ERROR! Sonde NOT in Launcher after LOAD”. I went back to check on what had gone wrong, but everything seemed to have worked fine (there was a sonde in the launcher waiting to be initialized). I took that sonde out, put it back into the bin, loaded again, and everything worked fine. I’m not sure what the issue was, but it didn’t seem to be anything with the hardware as that all worked as expected. One thing I noticed was that the tape wasn’t sticky enough to pull the sonde out of the launcher. I think this is because it was too cold (the sonde in the tube was hovering around 0C). The other shoehorn tool we have worked fine, and was able to pull the sonde out from the launch tube without using the tape.
One sonde (190550215) lost GPS at launch and never recovered.
The data from RF02 and RF03 are now uploaded to the FTP site.