firemanup
Well-Known Member
Just getting back into highpower after a 14 or 15 year hiatus, remember not doing a lot of flights back in the day that I would have liked to as i didnt have one of those expensive trackers that i didnt fully understand.
Fast forward to 2020 and getting back into the hobby, picked up a Featherweight gps tracker after someone else let me watch his work at Minimidwest power this year.
Got it up in the air for the first time yesterday. Started out as a piece of junk as it wouldn't work right, or uhhhhh maybe operator error? When i initially set it up at home i just named the tracker and the ground station the same thing, well the directional arrow was frozen up on the app, not pointing to the direction of the rocket, i figured maybe it just needed to get up in the air first, luckily someone else was there that was familiar with the system and i scrubbed the launch literally 10 seconds before it went up.
After 30 minutes of troubleshooting i tried renaming the tracker, and bingo, now the directional arrow worked. Don’t name the tracker and the base station the same thing lol
First flight was a Wildman Shapeshifter on a J350 for a short shakedown flight, as soon as she took off the app was talking to me, “launch detected” elevation updates, apogee update, descent rate updates, on top of that the app will “point” at the rockets current location. It will point you up to the correct elevation, correct direction, so if you lost view of it you can regain sight of it. Tells you how far out it is as well. Of course since it had a tracker in it, it landed within 150 of me and in the open.
After that confidence booster i flew a rocket/motor combo i would not have normally flown for fear of losing it.
Mach1 Area 51 4” went up on K805G to about 4500 feet, again the system gave me real time location and stat updates throughout the flight. Landed over a quarter mile away in 10ft tall corn, anyone whose been in those fields looking for rockets knows its very easy to loose a bird even that close, but the tracker brought me right to it.
Very impressed with this system and the software.
In both the field photos below the rocket is less than 10 feet away, great not having to spend 2 or 3 hours searching or potentially loosing a rocket.
Fast forward to 2020 and getting back into the hobby, picked up a Featherweight gps tracker after someone else let me watch his work at Minimidwest power this year.
Got it up in the air for the first time yesterday. Started out as a piece of junk as it wouldn't work right, or uhhhhh maybe operator error? When i initially set it up at home i just named the tracker and the ground station the same thing, well the directional arrow was frozen up on the app, not pointing to the direction of the rocket, i figured maybe it just needed to get up in the air first, luckily someone else was there that was familiar with the system and i scrubbed the launch literally 10 seconds before it went up.
After 30 minutes of troubleshooting i tried renaming the tracker, and bingo, now the directional arrow worked. Don’t name the tracker and the base station the same thing lol
First flight was a Wildman Shapeshifter on a J350 for a short shakedown flight, as soon as she took off the app was talking to me, “launch detected” elevation updates, apogee update, descent rate updates, on top of that the app will “point” at the rockets current location. It will point you up to the correct elevation, correct direction, so if you lost view of it you can regain sight of it. Tells you how far out it is as well. Of course since it had a tracker in it, it landed within 150 of me and in the open.
After that confidence booster i flew a rocket/motor combo i would not have normally flown for fear of losing it.
Mach1 Area 51 4” went up on K805G to about 4500 feet, again the system gave me real time location and stat updates throughout the flight. Landed over a quarter mile away in 10ft tall corn, anyone whose been in those fields looking for rockets knows its very easy to loose a bird even that close, but the tracker brought me right to it.
Very impressed with this system and the software.
In both the field photos below the rocket is less than 10 feet away, great not having to spend 2 or 3 hours searching or potentially loosing a rocket.