Here's the "Worlds Ugliest Rocket" just off the rail.
At apogee I sent the command to deploy. All went well, you can see the nose cone in the orange circle, the lower body in the white circle and the white puff is the apogee charge smoke.
Here's the body tube section coming down. Unfortunately the chute failed to open, you can see the chute trailing the rocket above and to the left.
Here's the lower section going into the corn "hot".
We used this frame later...
After the nose cone drogue deployed, I sent the command to deploy the main chute. As you can see, everything worked fine on this end of the rocket.
Here's the nose cone as it descends into the corn.
Click Here for a video of the flight. This is Xvid video format, you can download the codec here for Windows.
So, now we had two rocket sections in 8' tall corn in two different parts of the field. Before the launch I forgot
to install the homing beacon in the nose cone. Rather than pull it all open again, I decided to just use the telemetry
radio for direction finding if needed. The lower rocket did have a homing beacon in it, but it landed hard and
was no longer transmitting. I thought I had a pretty good fix on where the nose cone landed, so Ryland, Joel and
I spent about 30 minutes looking in the area I expected it to be. After no success, I decided to go home to get
my 900 MHz yagi antenna, which would allow me to direction find the nose cone by signal strength. While we were
back at my place, I printed off a picture of where the lower body went into the corn. I also put together a pole
with some small flags on it.
Ryland quickly located the nose cone as I plotted a straight course through the corn with the 900 MHz system. So the important part was found quickly, and I was really pleased at how easy it was to use the 900 MHz system to RDF. The OEM board has three LED's to indicate signal strength, and it proved easy and accurate using the yagi antenna to direction find the exact heading of the transmitter.
I feared the lower body section would prove harder to find. With no signal from the homing beacon, and Ryland and Joel having vastly different thoughts on where the body went down. I was running the computers, and didn't even see where the rocket went down. The plan was to use the picture we printed to get a visual reference from the trees in the background, then send Ryland into the corn with a radio and the pole with the flags. Joel and I watched the flag above the corn, and directed Ryland via the radio on a path we hoped would lead him to the rocket. As we sent Ryland out, I decided to give the homing beacon another try. To my surprise and pleasure, I picked up a strong signal as soon as I turned the receiver on. But it wasn't even needed, I told Ryland to hold his position while I got a fix, as he took a look around, he spotted the rocket.
Here's Ryland with the lower rocket section.
I was surprised the rocket didn't sustain more damage, the fin can was intact. The next afternoon I cut off the damaged area and added a new upper section. In keeping with this rockets mantra of "Worlds Ugliest Rocket" I made no attempt to pretty it up. Just a couple layers of fiberglass to attach the new section and a quick coat of old spray paint.
This recovery scheme wasn't thought out very well, and was really just a half hearted, for fun attempt. The next flight will be a more serious attempt at using the actual Ganymede flight recovery scheme.