Jerry O'Sullivan's web site: http://www.vahpr.com/

Photos & videos of this flight:

http://www.vahpr.com/nike/nflights.html

A description of the flight is on Jerry's site at the link above.

For this flight we put a RDAS Classic board, GPS board/antenna, and telemetry transmitter in the Nike Smoke nose cone. The objective was to test the GPS telemetry functionality in flight since we had not been able to do this in the Terrier - Sandhawk nose cone. The GPS signal easily penetrated the thick fiberglass, and cold start 3D fixes took place just as fast inside the nose cone as outside of it.

As you can see from photos of the Smoke nose cone on Jerry's page, it is conical until close to the base, where it converges back in. This design supposedly cuts down drag. For this flight we positioned the inverted V dipole with elements protruding through the transition section of the nose cone, where it was neither divergent or convergent. We vented the nose cone baseplate to the parachute compartment to minimize air flow effects. (Note: see the previous flight for the effects of positioning the antenna elements on the convergent section of the nose cone with no venting into the parachute compartment).

R-DAS files for download: telemetry downlink & classic board memory

The GPS plot is from the memory data so it shows the return path from retrieving the rocket, the telemetry plot looks identical except for the missing return path. This is a pretty sensitive active antenna/GPS combo since the return ride was inside a SUV. Red line is the vertical plot, the blue line is the position over ground. As this is a commercial GPS, lock was lost due to the rapid acceleration, but is regained when the rocket slows down. The nose cone was prematurely ejected, probably by a AltAcc that might have been damaged on the previous flight. This is visible in the GPS plot as the flattened trajectory, this is also shown on the acceleration and altitude plots below the 3D GPS plots. Apogee was approximately 5200 feet.

3D plots below are produced on the RDAS version 3.45 software (still under revision). This version allows maps or aerial photographs to be imported and the rocket track data can be overlaid based on the calibrated latitude and longitude points of the map or image. This map of the Higgs Dairy Farm launch site is extracted from the Delorme Topo 3.0 mapping program. This version of the RDAS software also allows GPS data point editing and provides vertical or Z axis altitude tick mark scaling, plus has several other enhancements.