First - the plugs:
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Hey folx! We had a very successful launch of Ponzu (Radio Rocket v3) on June 13th!
The first week after school lets out each year we do “Daddy Camp” which is basically a week of backyard camping and summer camp type activities - one of the mornings was set aside for Rocket launching, so we launched 7 rockets, including Ponzu, and it was a smashing success!
First, the details on Ponzu for this flight:
Height: 109.86cm ; 43.25”
Diameter: 41.6mm ; 1.64” (BT-60 sized tube)
Launch Weight, w/o Motor: 487g ; 17.18oz
Recovery: 30” parachute
Paint: Gold on the bottom 2/3, fading to blue with a spattered fade
Telemetry: Magnetometer, gyro, acceleration, barometric pressure, altitude, and messaging via LoRa on 434MHz.
Motor: G53FJ, 9 Second Ejection Delay
Launch Weight:634g ; 22oz
Altitude: 588.92m ; 1929ft
Max Velocity: 324kph ; 201mph
Max Acceleration: 179m/s^2 ; 18g (641.02m/s^2 ; 65g at parachute deployment)
Flight Time: 132s
This was our most impressive radio rocket flight to-date, in pretty much all regards - fastest speeds and highest altitude due to the new rocket and electronics design, AND the rocket was successfully recovered! There were only a couple things that went ‘wrong’ during this launch, which I’ll detail in a bit, but first, let’s do the exciting bit - launch videos!
As I tend to do for these launch reports, I’m just going to throw down the bullets of what we learned/things we might change for the future etc.
I had my laptop along to let the very youngest watch some Daniel Tiger during the setup etc. between launches. That went a long way towards keeping the tiniest members of the flight crew from going feral on us during the session:-)
We forgot our magnet to turn on Ponzu’s payload from outside the rocket, so we had to do a weird half-disassembly maneuver while the rocket was on the rail, to push the internal power button. It worked, but for the future we’re going to buy a bunch of big magnets on sticks to keep in the box, in my office, in the car, etc. so that we don’t have just 1, and leave it behind somewhere. The kid have some of these (associate link) at their school that they use for some lessons. They are nice and chunky and hard to loose, so we’ll probably order a package of these to have around in some strategic places.
We need to fiddle with the colors on the ground station’s touch screen to try to get maximum visibility outdoors. The current colors were a scheme that are considered high contrast, but outside it was still a little hard to see. I may need to just take it out in the back yard on a sunny day and play with colors till I find a combo that works well.
We need to tweak the code that generates the ‘velocity’ portion of the data. You may have noticed the dashboard didn’t show any velocity data on the velocity gauges - that is partially because I used units (cm/millisecond) in the code that turned out to not be quite granular enough. I’m updating that code to measure in mm/millisecond which gives more granularity/precision. I use weird units like that in the code, so that I can use integers in all the calculations (which the microcontroller can do faster), and the multiply up/divide down to more standard units in the dashboards for final display.
We had a much longer walk than planned - the rocket actually landed one farm over from our launch site, but luckily it was a farm where I know the farmer because we have kids the same age, and talk regularly enough that I was comfortable flagging him down in his field so that we could hike out through the hay he was raking to retrieve the rocket. Since we’re flying higher now, I probably need to invest in a Chute Release device (associate link). These slick little things basically use a rubber band wrapped around the parachute, to keep the parachute reefed when it deploys, so that the rocket will fall faster down to a set altitude before releasing the band and allowing the parachute to unfurl. This keeps the rocket from drifting too far during it’s descent.
For part of the ascent we didn’t get any telemetry (you can see several seconds in the video where no telemetry is received.) For now I’m going to blame that on our temporary antenna situation with the new ground station. Since the new ground station isn’t quite complete, the antenna was just sort of thrown on the table dangling from it’s little coax jumper, instead of being mounted. We may even switch to an egg-beater or even a directional antenna mounted via the mast-holder that we put on the side of the ground station box.
I think we’ll add 2 meter APRS back into our next flight. Luckily visibility was good, but we were high enough that we could have easily lost sight of the rocket, making it hard to find without some location tracking.
OR we may look into LoRa APRS - that’s a thing now, and since we already have LoRa on-board, if it isn’t too difficult burping out periodic LoRa APRS packets might help us keep the weight down instead of adding an additional device. That will be pretty contingent though on the infrastructure around here - I’m not sure how many, if any, LoRa igates or digipeaters are around my area.
I want to get our AREDN setup finalized, so that we can ‘send our data home’ via AREDN, and then do the live tooting and site updates from our home internet connection, based on the data received through the AREDN devices.
We’ll be ready to finish/tidy up the back panels etc. of the new ground station now that we know everything works pretty well.
We’ve got some options for adding on-board cameras laying around here, so we’ll try to work on that for some of the upcoming launches. We have a couple little ‘dongle’ cameras that we could attach, and I’ve also dabbled with ESP32 cams, so this could end up being either a recording that we retrieve later, or a live stream of video during the launch itself (or both?!)
Video, screen-grabs, helpers, etc. rocket flights are so short, that having lots of video, screen grabs, etc. helps when reviewing stuff post launch. I might try to rope in some more helpers, and more devices, in the future, to try and capture more video, dashboard stuff etc.
Dashboard playback - after this flight I whipped up a python script that will basically “play back” the telemetry data, so I can tweak up the dashboard and stuff and test with real-time data now, for future updates.
Max Acceleration data - The max acceleration recorded was actually at parachute deployment - I may tweak the code so that it shows “Max acceleration during ascent” since that’s what we’re after more than what the sensors read when the rocket blows its sections apart for recovery deployment.
Radio Rocket v4? I may start ‘building’ another series of radio rockets in parallel to the continued work on v3 and future iterations of the Radio Rocket. I’m thinking something along the lines of a “Radio-Rocket-Lite.” A lot of people have been interested in this project, and I’d like to do a much more simplistic version where I can put together a step-by-step of; go buy X rocket kit, X tracker, connect it to a battery, load X firmware, and go launch it!
This will wrap up this post for now, but I may come back and edit it, or write a follow up, as I continue analyzing the data. I’ll have some charts and such to share, which are always fun too!
Even though the big shebang is taking place in Xenia this weekend, there will still be happenings on the bands this weekend:
Contests:
NZART Sangster Shield Contest - https://www.nzart.org.nz/activities/contests/sangster-shield
His Maj. King of Spain Contest, CW - https://concursos.ure.es/en/s-m-el-rey-de-espana-cw/bases/
Arkansas QSO Party - http://www.arkqp.com/
Baltic Contest - http://www.lrsf.lt/en/
Run for the Bacon QRP Contest/W8DIZ Memorial Sprint - http://qrpcontest.com/pigrun/
Special Events:
05/04/2024 | NJ Knights of Columbus 128th State Convention
May 4-May 18, 0000Z-2359Z, K0C, Brick, NJ. NJKCARC (N2AJO). 7.225 14.240 21.350 28.340. Certificate & QSL. Art Olson, 339 18th Ave, Brick, NJ 08724. For domestic contacts: QSL card, send SASE; for QSL card and certificate, send two dollars. For DX contacts: QSL card, send two dollars; for QSL card and certificate, send five dollars. For more information, visit K0C on QRZ.com or Email: olson339@comcast.net www.qrz.com/db/K0C
05/12/2024 | National Police Week - To Honor Our Fallen Heros
May 12-May 18, 0001Z-2359Z, K3FBI/0-9, Fredericksburg, VA. FBI Amateur Radio Association. 14.275 7.060. Certificate. Jay Chamberlain - NS4J, 27 Fox Run Ln, Fredericksburg, VA 22405-3303. To honor all Law Enforcement members who have died in the line of duty. All bands and all modes. Multiple stations from around the U.S. Downloadable PDF certificate by the end of June at QRZ, https://www.qrz.com/db/K3FBI k3fbi@arrl.net
05/12/2024 | Police Services Week
May 12-May 18, 0000Z-0000Z, N4P, Gainesville, FL. W. Travis Loften High School Amateur Radio Club - K4WTL. 14.335. Certificate. Robert Lightner, 3435 NW 34th Terrace, Gainesville, FL 32605. www.qrz.com/db/k4wtl
05/18/2024 | National Maritime Day
May 18, 1300Z-2100Z, K3S, Baltimore, MD. Nuclear Ship Savannah ARC. 7.1 14.1 21.1 28.1. QSL. K3LU, 980 PATUXENT ROAD, Odenton, MD 21113. Single transmitter SSB and CW aboard N/S Savannah. Please check spotting networks for frequencies. Info on QRZ.com www.qrz.com/db/k3s
05/18/2024 | South Orange Amateur Radio Assoc., 50th Anniversary
May 18-May 19, 1700Z-0100Z, K6SOA, Mission Viejo, CA. South Orange Amateur Radio Assoc.-SOARA. 28.375 21.350 14.250 7.200. QSL. SOARA Special Event, P.O. Box 2545, Mission Viejo, CA 92690. To receive the QSL, send a SASE, or accept eQSL. soara.org
05/18/2024 | W6SFM Bug Roundup
May 18-May 20, 0000Z-0000Z, W6SFM, Fair Oaks, CA. Samuel F. Morse Amateur Radio Club. 3.533 7.033 14.033 28.033. QSL. Samuel F. Morse Amateur Radio Club, 4901 Minnesota Avenue, Fair Oaks, CA 95628. https://w6sfm.org/bug-roundup
05/19/2024 | National EMS Week
May 19-May 25, 0000Z-0000Z, N4E, Gainesville, FL. W.T. Loften High School Amateur Radio Club. 14.335. QSL. W.T. Loften High School ARC, 3000 East University Avenue, Gainesville, FL 32641. www.qrz.com/db/k4wtl
On a humorous note - I came across this video during one of my meanderings across the vast prairies of YouTube:
For a humorous parody type of video - I think it was produced quite well. And make sure to watch it to the very end! And while this video is meant to be taken as humorous satire, I personally know of two instances where this happened in real life. These persons got interested in Amateur Radio, got licensed and got into DX hunting quite heavily. They had the means to be able to afford deluxe stations and very credible antenna farms. Once they earned DXCC Honor Roll, they both basically said "What's left?" and sold all their equipment and allowed their licenses to lapse. What a shame!
Today marks the last "in house production day" at MFJ - interesting that they chose the first day of Hamvention for that. And speaking of Hamvention, I along with the rest of you, wonder what new goodies will be introduced this year - not that I'll be able to afford any of them!
Have a great weekend!
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least1
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