Looking to get my first GPS unit. Looking heavily at MissileWorks RTx. Anyone try them? Like or dislike? Other recommendations?
Also, I don't have my HAM license. Will get it eventually but it's not a priority right now.
Thanks!
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.
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.
I was under the impression that you had to buy a special receiver unit if you didn’t have an Android phone?
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.
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