Rocketry Planet

What a cool little rocket. I would still hate to lose it though!

Would be great for the new H399!

Yeah, it looks like a good deal.

You would stand a good chance of getting it back with a beeline transmitter. You could put a beeline and a Parrot in the nosecone and the antenna would be exposed at deployment, if single deploy. Dual deployment is certainly possible, also.

Adrian;

Have you solved the interference/interaction issues between the brb and your altimeter ? If not, that conductive chamber called a nose cone could be exasperate things. More especially since the brb sure seems to have freq. de-tuning issues related to interaction with metal in close proximitry.

Interference is an issue in certain situations, but in this application there are several ways to work around it. The accelerometer is completely unaffected, so using it for apogee deployment would be no problem. The baro sensor is fine between the beeps, so you can use it in a dual deploy configuration and just ignore the effects in the recorded data. If you need a clean set of recorded baro data, you can either fly it with motor ejection (there's no interference unless charges are hooked up) or use one of the three deployment outputs to switch the transmitter on after apogee. That last method used to be my preferred method for my own rockets but since then I have decided it doesn't provide enough transmit time for the transmitter to be as effective as it should be.

I think I read that this nosecone is RF-transparent because it doesn't use continuous carbon fibers, but I don't know for sure. But the only difference that would make would be to give you the option of leaving the antenna inside the cone instead of having it exposed after deployment. I think the interference wouldn't be affected enough to make a difference in the mitigations you would need to do.

Um, well I would be surprised about a graphite/carbon nose cone not affecting things in the rf domain with the small wavelength fields and power densities that are being used. I had read earlier about your flight in northern colorado last weekend and was just wondering if you had worked on any new solution concerning the rf issues. Thanks for the reply above.

As far as dealing with these two potential problems and the one I noted in my earlier email; should they become issues prior to flight for me I will try applying some standard techniques for dealing with them.

Thanks again for the reply.