Chch inventor brings home the weather

Between jobs, electronics and software engineer Synco Reynders would pack a lunch, grab his radio-controlled, two-metre wing span glider and head for the Port Hills.

Blue skies, stiff winds, sweeping views: life couldn't get much better - until the cellphone rang. And then life became unnecessarily complicated as Reynders kept his eyes on the glider, fiddled with the remote control to avoid a crash landing while fumbling phone buttons.

He became equally flustered when curious mountainbikers stopped to check out the glider. He was too distracted to chat.

Eventually his engineering mind kicked in. "I asked myself, 'what's the coolest thing I can do for the rest of my life?' "

The answer was to build gliders that could fly themselves. To financially justify this endeavour, he knew they could not be hobbyists' toys. Thinking about professional applications, he floated the idea of weather balloons.

Scientists launch them with altitude, temperature, pressure, humidity and ozone sensors glued inside Styrofoam bricks. The bricks' sensors transmit atmospheric data back to the scientists.

When balloons reach 30km above terra firma, they pop and fall back to Earth. But scientists lose the balloons and bricks because they have no idea where they land. This is a problem, Reynders explains, because ozone sensors can cost $6000 each.

And as ozone is one measure of climate change, scientists are keen to gather as much data as possible. These crucial experiments are too expensive to carry out regularly, Reynders says.

He came up with the idea of adding GPS antennae and computer chips for logging flight paths onto bricks, attaching bricks to gliders and fastening gliders to weather balloons. He could programme gliders to release themselves from balloons at pre-determined times or altitudes.

A hand-held radio monitor could track the glider's flight path as it flew to where the GPS told it to land -- for example, at the launch site.

"I called NIWA to ask if they would be interested," he says. They were.

His garage proved to be an ideal workspace, and Reynders admits he bought his house specifically for the garage space. It is divided into two sections. The front half houses mountainbikes, a 1952 Morris Minor and a workbench for assembling Styrofoam gliders equipped with GPS systems, batteries and motors. The garage's back portion serves as mission control.

Here, Reynders solders GPS antennae and homemade computer chips to circuit boards. He writes GPS software programmes that calculate gliders' slope, longitude, latitude and vertical speeds and direction.

He downloads world weather reports from a US supercomputer and runs flight path simulations from altitudes between 35km above Earth to ground zero in all weather conditions. After six months of programming, simulating and learning how not to "toast" circuit boards when soldering, Reynders was ready for test launches.

"In the beginning, I ran up and down Halswell Quarry 15 times a day," he says. "It was freezing, in the middle of winter, and I stripped down to my boxer shorts to retrieve glider bits from puddles."

After each launch, he downloaded the gliders' flight-path into cliff faces, tweaked the GPS programme and tried again. Eventually he succeeded in landing them on the ground.

Reynders carried out subsequent field trials in paddocks near Christchurch. He launched weather balloons with gliders pre-programmed to release themselves at increasingly higher altitudes. The landings were reasonably accurate, but sometimes Reynders had to negotiate barbed wire or electric fences when gliders landed in an adjacent field. One time, he forgot to check the battery before a launch.

His glider disappeared. "That's called product development," he says. "Now I write `reward if found' on my gliders and carry a bottle of wine in the car boot just in case."

The big test came when he launched a weather balloon with a glider programmed to release itself 20km above Earth. He says he was nervous for two hours because he lost radio communication at 15km, when temperatures hit minus 70deg. "The radio battery stopped."

Reynders deemed the experiment a success when the glider landed about 30m from the launch site.

After six months of field trials, figuring out how to insulate the battery from the cold and a further year of market research, GPS Boomerang: designers and manufacturers of unmanned aircraft, was open for business.

Reynders says he's sold a handful so far -- each glider costs about $2000 -- but unforeseen problems have slowed sales.

Scientists who want to buy a GPS Boomerang glider must find the funds, which means writing grants and waiting six months to learn if the grant has been successful. "There's not much research money to go around," Reynders says.

He quickly realised, as most Kiwi businessmen do, if his business was going to take off, he needed to reach overseas markets. Selling unmanned aircraft raised all sorts of problems in the US and Britain because that term usually refers to fighter planes carrying bombs.

Flying unmanned aircraft is prohibited by most aviation authorities. They do approve of "weather balloon payloads," but this term does not imply that the payload actually flies and lands itself, which is what GPS Boomerang is all about.

There is no defined term for gliders floating up into the sky fastened to a weather balloon and then flying themselves back to Earth.

Reynders' windfall came when he met a group of Christchurch air traffic controllers at a party. Not wanting to duck aviation rules but wanting to take advantage of his luck, he discussed with them what not to call his unmanned aircraft. Reynders now describes his glider as a "weather balloon with a recoverable payload".

Also upon the air traffic controllers' advice, his test flights stay clear of the American Air Force when it flies to Antarctica from Christchurch Airport. It could shoot down an unmanned aircraft.

For more information, visit www.gpsboomerang.com

 

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