Payload retrieval poles

[professorfungus]

Hello, I am working with the East TN division, and we were wondering which group had the very long collapsible poles for payload retrieval in trees? I don't remember the maker of the poles, nor the group who brought them.

I did find a fiberglass version intended for temporary antennas (86ft), but what a price tag! Also, this isn't really intended to snag things out of high places.
www.spiderbeam.us/product_info.php?info=p259_Spiderbeam%2026m%20fiberglass%20pole.html

Thoughts? We will often need to reach 100ft+.

[James Flaten]

We use collapsible poles on balloon flights regularly to try to snag payloads out of not-too-tall trees. Our procedure is to use a pole to lift up a rope with a hook on it then pull the payload down using the rope, never stressing the pole itself. (Note - This procedure is very hard on payloads, under the best of circumstances, and we have also encountered situations where payloads literally cannot be pulled down by rope from the ground because of intervening branches.) We have two well-worn (i.e. breaking) 33-ft poles and a recently purchased a 72-ft pole that we showed off in Bozeman (though it turned out that only about 50 feet of that is actually collapsible, which was disappointing) for even more money than the one you linked to. So you need to think hard about whether this is a good investment - for us it was. I don't think there exists a pole that will go up 100 feet which is cheap enough to purchase, strong enough to be useful, and light enough to carry into a recovery zone (but if you find one please let us all know). Despite safety concerns, for really tall trees you may need to resort to climbing (tree-climbing equipment is cheaper than extendable poles) or hiring a boom truck (if you happen to be close enough to a road - unlikely - but that is the only solution for payloads landing on power lines). On the other hand, if you can get permission to cut the tree down (surprisingly easy, at least around here), try not to let the falling tree branches squash the payloads! We know of teams who routinely throw (or use a water balloon launcher or a wrist rocket) lines over payloads then pull them down (with two lines rather than with a hook), but we've struggled with that approach for trees higher than we can deal with using our poles. On one occasion we lashed two poles together to get additional reach. We carry an extendable ladder to give us another 20 feet of reach too. If you want more details about our experiences and equipment, contact me directly. James Flaten - MN Space Grant - U of MN - Twin Cities - [e-mail]

[njordan]

In Huntsville, we use an about 30 ft pole. This is about the max we have gotten without losing control of the pole. We have found that the poles become unmanageable if they are too long.