Two years ago at BALLS 24, our team from Tripoli San Diego made a 100K' attempt using a two stage rocket derived from the AeroPac 100K' rocket design (98mm booster, 75mm sustainer). In the sustainer, we used a TeleMega for drogue deployment, staging with tilt sensor, and GPS tracking (our backup was a Raven). We liked the features in a small form factor for a reasonable price. Our launch, however, was plagued by a booste motor nozzle failure, followed by an unrelated and explicable loss of telemetry downlink. Those failures, along with a failure of proper chute deployment resulted in a core sample of the whole stack, followed by hours of digging of playa to recover the remnants.
Anyway, we are a planning another attempt and are evaluating electronics, but are understandably wary of the TeleMega, even though we still have the receiver USB module and haven't found a better value of price vs features and form-factor. There have been some firmware upgrades since our ill-fated attempt that, among other things, fixed a bug that may or may not have been at the root of our telemetry failure (it is not clear that this failure was just telemetry or the whole unit). Does anyone have experience with this device and can lend some advice?
Thanks!
Anyway, we are a planning another attempt and are evaluating electronics, but are understandably wary of the TeleMega, even though we still have the receiver USB module and haven't found a better value of price vs features and form-factor. There have been some firmware upgrades since our ill-fated attempt that, among other things, fixed a bug that may or may not have been at the root of our telemetry failure (it is not clear that this failure was just telemetry or the whole unit). Does anyone have experience with this device and can lend some advice?
Thanks!