I'm a Rocket!
My ham radio interests revolve mostly around packet modes - specifically APRS (where I go by N3VEM-11) and 70cm LoRa.
In addition to radio, I really like telemetry, ammonium perchlorate, wide open spaces, anything written by Newton, and getting high.
(*disclaimer* I'm not REALLY a rocket - just a person pretending to be one)
| Callsign | N3VEM-11 |
| Website | https://n3vem.com/blog/radiorocket/ |
| APRS | https://aprs.fi/n3vem-11 |
| Favorite Fuel | ammonium perchlorate |
To add insult to injury, I’ve left it running on battery power all night, so approaching 10 hours, and haven’t had nary a power blip😤
I’m now suspecting that maybe a wire somewhere was just loose, which has me thinking that maybe it’s time to take the hodgepodge of parts that are wired together in there, and just make a couple custom PCBs, to reduce the rats nest of point to point wiring.
Arg. At our recent launch our fancy ground station kept wanting to shut down, with what behaved like a power issue, so I assumed I was getting too much voltage drop when firing the igniters or something. With the same setup, firing the same types of igniters, and batteries not charged or anything since then, I can’t reproduce the issue on the workbench.
Angry rocket am I.
Even though a ground station power issue kept us from testing our V4 electronics today, we still had a blast launching a few of the kids’ rockets!
Conditions at the moment are looking good for a launch tomorrow, so we’re lining up our stuff at the door to load in the car in the morning. Each of the kids picked out a rocket to launch and we’ll also launch Ponzu with our current “minimally viable” version 4 electronics, to test out the bits that are done so far.
We’ll set up the AREDN stuff too, which should let us send data via the mesh back home, where we can then push out some toots in your general direction.
