Jesse Frey <[email protected]> writes: > At the Alamosa launch last weekend, I had my TeleMetrum reset after > the apogee charge was fired. I suspect this could be related to my AV > bay coming apart.
> What was troubling was that AltosDroid did not seem to give me a range > to the rocket or directions on the "Recover" screen. If the power got interrupted as the apogee charge fired, and then restores, the board will "reboot". If the rocket is no longer nose-up at that point (they're usually nearly horizontal at apogee), the board is going to power up in idle mode instead of pad mode, and thus won't be transmitting. And if AltosDroid never sees packets during descent, it'll have a hard time telling you where to look... > My question is why did tracking not work and could I have done > anything to find it had I not been able to see it all the way down? If the board is powered up but in idle mode, it's possible that if you get "near" it, you can use monitor idle to "ping" it and find out where it thinks it is. However, UHF communication links can be challenging when the airframe is flat on the ground, or in a ditch, or behind a bunch of ground clutter. The other thing you can do is get the .telem file off your phone and onto a laptop, and either look at the flight in the plotting code, or export it and look at it either in a spreadsheet or in Google Earth. If you can see the trajectory the rocket was following at apogee before the power went out, and think a bit about the wind, you can often estimate where it might have touched down and use that as the starting point for a search grid. Keith and I have done that for our own projects a time or two with success. The short answer, honestly, is "losing power at apogee is really bad, try not to have that happen". This is also one of the reasons it's never a bad idea to have redundant electronics in any project flying high enough to go out of sight or potentially be challenging to recover. I hope that helps! Feel free to ask if you have more questions. Bdale
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ altusmetrum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gag.com/mailman/listinfo/altusmetrum
