MissileWorks RTx
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the deal breaker for me with the Missleworks is the lack of support for iPhone. I am looking at either an Eggfinder or, if it gets released soon, the Featherweight tracker.
djkingsley
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I use the RTx system exclusivly, I have the full base station with lcd & case and 5 rocket units. Using the base station with the lcd module you can walk straight to your rocket, no need to connect to a phone or tablet. I find that the system works best with 9v batteries for the on-board unit. I had issues with LiPo batteries swelling and splitting during flight causing a power failure.
Eric
Well-Known Member
The featherweight unit is a amazing. Currently only IPhone support. I was beta testing a unit until my Avalanche came in ballistic. So I will get another and keep going.
But I also love my Eggfinger Mini and TRS. I would highly recommend an eggfinder if you can solder. That system,will walk you straight to your rocket with one box, or you can also use your phone with map app.
A buddy just started using the T3 system and lives it as well.
But I also love my Eggfinger Mini and TRS. I would highly recommend an eggfinder if you can solder. That system,will walk you straight to your rocket with one box, or you can also use your phone with map app.
A buddy just started using the T3 system and lives it as well.
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Dont follow? RTx is the bomb. It is a stand alone unit. No phone or maps needed. Just follow the arrow. As far as iphone, just plug & chug lat/lon into MotionX.
Jozef
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Used my RTx for the first time at Mini Midwest Power. Got the printed hand held base unit. It continually showed distance change and direction as rocket descended. Just follow direction arrows and the distance display continually updates. Took me right to my rocket which landed 1,950 feet away over a knoll in a cornfield. Base unit requires a 9v or 2s 7.4v LIPO for the display to be bright. (thank you Jason for the tip) The recommended 1S 3.7v does not provide a bright display. I had the recommended 3.7v 1S LIPO in the rocket unit. As stated, another screen shows coordinates so you can plug those into Motion-X on your I phone. I have MAC Performance nosecone bay kits on 54mm, 3 inch and several 4 inch rockets to move the RTx from rocket to rocket. My experience is a sample of one, but it works as advertised.
I was under the impression that you had to buy a special receiver unit if you didn’t have an Android phone?
Sort of. There are several options. The Navigator is what I have & tells you your position as well as rocket. The Standard system will only provide you with position of rocket. Then you can either get blue tooth option or just take lat/lon & plug/chug into mapping app. I use iPhone MotionX app if I want a map but it really isn't necessary with the Navigator. It really is a great unit. As others have mentioned, the Featherweight GPS is soon to be released to the public. I am one of the beta testers. It's not bad but still lacks some features such as data logging. If you want a map, you still have to plug & chug coordinates into a mapping app such as MotionX.
I love my MissileWorks RTx system. I purchased the LCD screen to be able to navigate with my base unit without the need for any additional interface. I have the rocket unit mounted to a board with Lipo battery on the back. This board slides into a 38mm coupler ‘holder’ in the nose cone of two of my rockets. I mounted everything for base unit (RTx, LCD, battery and on/off switch) in an old Dewalt drill bit box. Prior to this past weekend I had been getting used to it with a half dozen or so lower altitude flights (2-4K). Frankly, that’s not necessary. Super easy ‘buy and fly’. Flew a 3 inch diameter tube fin rocket on a CTI K260 (54 mm, 6 grain) to 11,500 ft. Lost sight of it, but the RTx showed decent rate so we knew it was safely under drogue and directed our visual search so we just caught it on the horizon under main chute just before touch down. It was about a half mile out over a small rise in the grasslands. The RTx via the arrows on the LCD walked us right to it.
captbk
Well-Known Member
I have them it two rockets. Both have been over 10,000 ft. Super easy to use right out of the box. Once you loose sight of your rocket you can "watch" the flight on you LCD screen. It will tell you what direction to look during decent so it really gives you all the info you need. I highly recommend them.
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The RTX in my opinion is the gold standard for gps tracking. Ive used it in countless flights farthest being when main popped at 8k on a super windy day landed 2 1/2 miles away. Just jumped in truck and drove watching the arrows.
absolutely love it for reliability.
Only thing I highly HIGHLY dislike is the new smaller T3 is not compatible with old system which is super hard for me to believe since they use same xbee for data transfer. As well as same gps module just smaller board with some stuff taken out. I think they don't link them so you have to buy another system but that's just my tin foil hat opinion.
That being said I am holding off buying anymore from them, and will be buying the featherlight or egg timer for my smaller rockets.
absolutely love it for reliability.
Only thing I highly HIGHLY dislike is the new smaller T3 is not compatible with old system which is super hard for me to believe since they use same xbee for data transfer. As well as same gps module just smaller board with some stuff taken out. I think they don't link them so you have to buy another system but that's just my tin foil hat opinion.
That being said I am holding off buying anymore from them, and will be buying the featherlight or egg timer for my smaller rockets.
Sounds like you got a GPS tracking addiction. Kurt
woferry
Well-Known Member
I've had a rather mixed result with mine, initially I would have said nothing but praise, now I'm planning to switch to something else.
I picked up a RRC3/RTx combo to use in the sustainer of my 2-stage rockets, using my Eggfinder Tx's for booster tracking. So a separate system that wouldn't conflict with the EFTx was good for tracking, and the RRC3 obviously for its 3rd output and airstarts, plus its ability to send data through the RTx back to the base unit, made this combo make perfect sense to me. For a sustainer-only test flight and the first two 2-stage flights everything worked great, including the second flight where when I punched the last coordinates received by the RTx base unit into Motion-X dropped the pin right into a lake that I didn't even know existed near the launch site.
After recovering the sustainer from the lake the RRC3 was dead (well, it powers-up but always thinks the LCD screen is attached even when it isn't, so it never goes into flight mode). The RTx seemed fine, downloaded the flight data using mDACs and still got GPS lock/transmission to the base unit at least over a short distance (i.e. at home).
To replace the damaged/potentially-damaged electronics, I ordered another RRC3 and RTx rocket unit. My understanding is that MissileWorks was tracking the base units they sent to people (since I don't have any way of knowing how mine was unique-ified), and if you ordered more rocket units later they would could pre-configured knowing how to talk to your base unit. That didn't seem to be the case for me, I've never gotten the new RTx to link with my base unit. So I need to talk to MW about that. For a non-2-stage flight of a rocket that shares the AVBay with my sustainer I flew the new RRC3 with the old RTx, which all seemed to work fine at my camp. When I got out to the pad the initial sync of the RTx rocket/base and RRC3 worked and I was getting data displayed on the base unit with the normal beeps. Then, all of a sudden the base unit went totally silent. I never saw this before, normally the weirdest sequence of different tone beeps comes out of the base, where as best as I could discern the higher-frequency beep tones represent data received from the rocket unit, and the lower-frequency beep tones represent the base unit not hearing anything from the rocket for a bit, which always seemed to happen surprisingly frequently for me, more like 2-4 seconds of "bad beeping" followed by some "good beeps" during the entire time from loading on the pad (with the base unit a few feet away from the rocket) to recovering the rocket (assuming it stayed in range the entire time, obviously more bad-beeps when the signal is lost). But here the base unit wasn't making any beeps at all, and the data it displayed was 0's. The rocket flew and was recovered (thankfully) without the help of the RTx, and when I connected it to download the data the (still powered) RTx hadn't recorded any data at all (there were some short logs from a few times I had powered it up at camp pre-flight, but nothing from the actual flight).
Now of course this was the RTx rocket unit that previously went for a swim, it seemed to work fine outside of a rocket but is obviously not totally trustworthy at this point. But the fact that the replacement RTx won't do anything with my base unit makes it rather useless to me. And I have no idea what it means that the base unit stopped beeping entirely after receiving data from the rocket, why it wouldn't have at least been indicating an issue and reporting the last-known data I don't get.
For the future I'm planning on converting the AVBay to using an Eggtimer TRS/Quantum pairing in the sustainer, which gets me the tracking and airstart as well as a 4th output for a backup main charge (with the Quantum's nifty feature of firing the main early if it thinks the rocket is descending without drogue). I'm also looking forward to trying out Featherweight's tracker.
I picked up a RRC3/RTx combo to use in the sustainer of my 2-stage rockets, using my Eggfinder Tx's for booster tracking. So a separate system that wouldn't conflict with the EFTx was good for tracking, and the RRC3 obviously for its 3rd output and airstarts, plus its ability to send data through the RTx back to the base unit, made this combo make perfect sense to me. For a sustainer-only test flight and the first two 2-stage flights everything worked great, including the second flight where when I punched the last coordinates received by the RTx base unit into Motion-X dropped the pin right into a lake that I didn't even know existed near the launch site.
After recovering the sustainer from the lake the RRC3 was dead (well, it powers-up but always thinks the LCD screen is attached even when it isn't, so it never goes into flight mode). The RTx seemed fine, downloaded the flight data using mDACs and still got GPS lock/transmission to the base unit at least over a short distance (i.e. at home).To replace the damaged/potentially-damaged electronics, I ordered another RRC3 and RTx rocket unit. My understanding is that MissileWorks was tracking the base units they sent to people (since I don't have any way of knowing how mine was unique-ified), and if you ordered more rocket units later they would could pre-configured knowing how to talk to your base unit. That didn't seem to be the case for me, I've never gotten the new RTx to link with my base unit. So I need to talk to MW about that. For a non-2-stage flight of a rocket that shares the AVBay with my sustainer I flew the new RRC3 with the old RTx, which all seemed to work fine at my camp. When I got out to the pad the initial sync of the RTx rocket/base and RRC3 worked and I was getting data displayed on the base unit with the normal beeps. Then, all of a sudden the base unit went totally silent. I never saw this before, normally the weirdest sequence of different tone beeps comes out of the base, where as best as I could discern the higher-frequency beep tones represent data received from the rocket unit, and the lower-frequency beep tones represent the base unit not hearing anything from the rocket for a bit, which always seemed to happen surprisingly frequently for me, more like 2-4 seconds of "bad beeping" followed by some "good beeps" during the entire time from loading on the pad (with the base unit a few feet away from the rocket) to recovering the rocket (assuming it stayed in range the entire time, obviously more bad-beeps when the signal is lost). But here the base unit wasn't making any beeps at all, and the data it displayed was 0's. The rocket flew and was recovered (thankfully) without the help of the RTx, and when I connected it to download the data the (still powered) RTx hadn't recorded any data at all (there were some short logs from a few times I had powered it up at camp pre-flight, but nothing from the actual flight).
Now of course this was the RTx rocket unit that previously went for a swim, it seemed to work fine outside of a rocket but is obviously not totally trustworthy at this point. But the fact that the replacement RTx won't do anything with my base unit makes it rather useless to me. And I have no idea what it means that the base unit stopped beeping entirely after receiving data from the rocket, why it wouldn't have at least been indicating an issue and reporting the last-known data I don't get.
For the future I'm planning on converting the AVBay to using an Eggtimer TRS/Quantum pairing in the sustainer, which gets me the tracking and airstart as well as a 4th output for a backup main charge (with the Quantum's nifty feature of firing the main early if it thinks the rocket is descending without drogue). I'm also looking forward to trying out Featherweight's tracker.
markkoelsch
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I've had a rather mixed result with mine, initially I would have said nothing but praise, now I'm planning to switch to something else.
I picked up a RRC3/RTx combo to use in the sustainer of my 2-stage rockets, using my Eggfinder Tx's for booster tracking. So a separate system that wouldn't conflict with the EFTx was good for tracking, and the RRC3 obviously for its 3rd output and airstarts, plus its ability to send data through the RTx back to the base unit, made this combo make perfect sense to me. For a sustainer-only test flight and the first two 2-stage flights everything worked great, including the second flight where when I punched the last coordinates received by the RTx base unit into Motion-X dropped the pin right into a lake that I didn't even know existed near the launch site.
To replace the damaged/potentially-damaged electronics, I ordered another RRC3 and RTx rocket unit. My understanding is that MissileWorks was tracking the base units they sent to people (since I don't have any way of knowing how mine was unique-ified), and if you ordered more rocket units later they would could pre-configured knowing how to talk to your base unit. That didn't seem to be the case for me, I've never gotten the new RTx to link with my base unit. So I need to talk to MW about that. For a non-2-stage flight of a rocket that shares the AVBay with my sustainer I flew the new RRC3 with the old RTx, which all seemed to work fine at my camp. When I got out to the pad the initial sync of the RTx rocket/base and RRC3 worked and I was getting data displayed on the base unit with the normal beeps. Then, all of a sudden the base unit went totally silent. I never saw this before, normally the weirdest sequence of different tone beeps comes out of the base, where as best as I could discern the higher-frequency beep tones represent data received from the rocket unit, and the lower-frequency beep tones represent the base unit not hearing anything from the rocket for a bit, which always seemed to happen surprisingly frequently for me, more like 2-4 seconds of "bad beeping" followed by some "good beeps" during the entire time from loading on the pad (with the base unit a few feet away from the rocket) to recovering the rocket (assuming it stayed in range the entire time, obviously more bad-beeps when the signal is lost). But here the base unit wasn't making any beeps at all, and the data it displayed was 0's. The rocket flew and was recovered (thankfully) without the help of the RTx, and when I connected it to download the data the (still powered) RTx hadn't recorded any data at all (there were some short logs from a few times I had powered it up at camp pre-flight, but nothing from the actual flight).
Now of course this was the RTx rocket unit that previously went for a swim, it seemed to work fine outside of a rocket but is obviously not totally trustworthy at this point. But the fact that the replacement RTx won't do anything with my base unit makes it rather useless to me. And I have no idea what it means that the base unit stopped beeping entirely after receiving data from the rocket, why it wouldn't have at least been indicating an issue and reporting the last-known data I don't get.
For the future I'm planning on converting the AVBay to using an Eggtimer TRS/Quantum pairing in the sustainer, which gets me the tracking and airstart as well as a 4th output for a backup main charge (with the Quantum's nifty feature of firing the main early if it thinks the rocket is descending without drogue). I'm also looking forward to trying out Featherweight's tracker.
I would contact Jim Amos at MW. He has always delivered top notch service.
blackjack2564
Crazy Jim's Gone Banana's
Also the switch bank on the unit has 2 settings. All units are same.
The switch position determines wether it's transmitting [rocket] or receiving [base]. I had same issue.
Simple change in position fixed problem.
The unit has electronic serial number, which shows [been so long not sure] on LCD display or when hooked up to flight viewer. Amos keeps owner [original] linked to units via the serial number and that's how he can assign new units to old base receivers.
Manual has switch settings for above discussion ...I would check that first, see which dip setting for transmit....match to yours.
The switch position determines wether it's transmitting [rocket] or receiving [base]. I had same issue.
Simple change in position fixed problem.
The unit has electronic serial number, which shows [been so long not sure] on LCD display or when hooked up to flight viewer. Amos keeps owner [original] linked to units via the serial number and that's how he can assign new units to old base receivers.
Manual has switch settings for above discussion ...I would check that first, see which dip setting for transmit....match to yours.
Woferry, Jim has a day job so be patient but he is a stand up guy. He's never let me down and always provided top notch customer service.
Look at the T3 as a ready built EggFinder with more power. Also, one needs to practice before flying whatever system they are using.
I take out whatever I plan to use a week or so in advance and dry run the setup to re familiarize myself. Kurt
I take out whatever I plan to use a week or so in advance and dry run the setup to re familiarize myself. Kurt
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