1. Get my first DD flight in. [DONE! First and second were both sucessful]
2. Do a tip to tip fin treatment on my October Skies XP. [Getting closer as weather is warming up]
3. Get my L2 certification. [L2 exam and cert flight rained out - now waiting for fall or early spring in California]
4. Get a tracking system for my birds. [Still doing research on which setup to buy, ham license is a goal]
Get an EggFinder with the LCD receiver and work with it. Reason: It's much more economical than the Ham Radio solutions and it will help you find your rockets now. Don't get me wrong, I'm a ham and APRS track too but the cost is stiff if you
want an all-in-one automatic tracking, "navigating to" solution. If you want that, a Kenwood D72A and a used Garmin 60CsX with an interface cable will make up the receiving station with a 70cm Beeline GPS APRS tracker.
The Kenwood will set you back $450.00, used Garmin ~$200.00 Beeline GPS $215.00. So that is a sizable layout but one can lock the Garmin on their rocket and the Heading Situation Indicator will point to the rocket waypoint plus show you on a map. The 60CsX has a "sight 'n go" feature that lets you shoot a line to a descending rocket and will allow you to walk a line to the rocket. Helpful for LPR,MPR and HPR if you can see the descent. Shoot the line just before it
touches down. I saw a downed rocket on the other side of two deep drainage ditches that I couldn't walk through. I pulled out the mapping GPS and shot a nice clear line to the rocket and then had to walk way the heck to the west,
out of sight of the rocket, to crossover. I just followed the line on the HSI and it took me to the rocket. The rocket didn't have a tracker of any kind in it.
Stay away from used D7A's. I have two of them and the frequency oscillators are going out of spec on both of them. Can't receive and decode signals anymore. Not worth ~$100.00 for repair.
You can cut back on the receiving station and use a Mobilinkd TNC that you bind to your Android device and use APRSDroid. That will set you back $70.00, use free APRSDroid with the free maps and any ham radio H/T and you can have a budget station that
doesn't do the "auto-navigation" stuff but will work. Beeline GPS off course on top of that.
Sounds like alot of $$$$ but 7 years ago the Ham Radio solution was more economical than the 900Mhz unlicensed systems available at the time. I still recommend getting you Tech license because you can learn about plain RDF tracking that people still do.
Just gives you a bearing but the trackers can be cheaper and if you use an H/T with a simple offset attenuator is very serviceable. An XFM-1 rocket transmitter is low powered but I get about 1200' range on the ground. Can't beat $15.00 to play around with it and works for large modrocs. Of course the commercial RDF setups can run close to the cost of a GPS tracker setup. Me, I want to know where it's at, go get it directly, bring it back and fly the next rocket. I don't like running around looking for an errant rocket because that means less time for flying. If you live in the Midwest where flight opportunities may not present themselves for some time, you want to fly as much as you can. Looking for lost rockets is not time well spent as far as flying goes.
I've found 5 "lost" rockets quickly that would not have been found by me that day. The APRS setup has paid for itself from the recovered hardware I likely would have lost.
You can to alot of that with an EggFinder with the LCD receiver and a handheld mapping GPS now. Don't wait to get your ham ticket if you don't want to. Kurt
