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Welcome to my rocket site!
Please feel free to link my site, if you would like to have my site linked to yours, go to the links section and add it, once I review it (get a lot of 'spam' links posted) I'll post it up for you.
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| Send Your Name To The Moon! |
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 You can send your name to the moon aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Deadline is June 27, 2008 for the submission of names. Click here to sign up!
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Posted by Jon on Thursday, May 08 @ 09:28:16 CDT (98 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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Hey there, I'm still alive. I got out of the hobby scene for a while due to some medical things. I'm just wrapping up a build on a Thunder Tiger Mini-Titan electric R/C helicopter, details soon on my heli page. I'm not sure of the status on my rockets, my NAR and METRA memberships both expired which means I have to do my level 1 Cert.. Again... but the Level 2 rocket is comming along nicely, it's just been waiting for me to do something with it for the last year+ so i think maybe I should. If I do, I'll post it here.
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Posted by Jon on Saturday, May 03 @ 02:45:43 CDT (102 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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| NASA's STEREO First Photo's |
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NASA's STEREO solar observatory has taken its first photo's, click here to see them!
"STEREO, launched on Oct. 25, 2006, consists of observation systems orbiting the sun in front of and behind the Earth. Just as our two eyes give us a three-dimensional view of the world, the views provided by each STEREO system can be combined to provide a three-dimensional view of the sun. Though the first STEREO images were taken in early December, the two systems won't be in position to give three dimensional images until April 2007."
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Posted by Jon on Saturday, January 20 @ 20:14:59 CST (200 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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| Police Reality Shows to get more entertaining! |
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 The maker of tazers is releasing a new module that plugs into the tazer guns, when the trigger is pulled the video starts recording, this is bound to add an all new level of excitement to all those police chase and police reality shows out there. Click here for the Wired Article.
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Posted by Jon on Saturday, January 20 @ 18:25:37 CST (210 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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Posted by Jon on Thursday, November 30 @ 21:33:01 CST (211 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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Still out traveling in Colorado at the moment, so far I've been to Illinois, Michigan, Colorado and California on this trip for the last 3 weeks, took quite a few photo's of the area. Mt. Shasta had some great scenery I stayed at a small inn at the base of the mountain and the view from the back window looked at the towering snow covered mountain, it was great even though I was working through the holiday. Managed to meet up with my dad in Cali and have a good afternoon visiting and such, living on opposite sides of the country we dont see each other much.
I am a bit surprised at how some of the most backwoods seeming places seem to have high speed internet via hardwire or wireless connections in their hotels or motels, the reach of broadband is slowly penetrating deeper into the wilderness. Since I've started my travels I have not been in one hotel which did not offer me a decent internet connection, although some do practice port blocking which makes certain apps difficult.
I went from Colorado, to Cali and am now back in Colorado. The scenery all over in Colorado is just incredible, if you just love nature, I can't think of a better place to recommend driving through. I preferential to Winter and the snow, but I'm sure its just as impressive in the summer. Click on 'Read More' if you're interested in more about my trips.
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Posted by Jon on Thursday, November 30 @ 01:16:22 CST (190 reads)(Read More... | 3349 bytes more | Score: 0) |
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| Pushing Portable Applications for Hobbyist Apps |
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I sort of jumpstarted into rockets again right as my travel season came about, so now im a bit more busy with work related things, looking to get back into the rockets again and hopefully I'll have my shiny Level 1 NAR card sitting in the mail pile when i get home.
I've been traveling all over the US doing installations and, by chance, picked up on a growing new thing for traveling laptop user types. I picked up a 2 Gig Sandisk Cruzer flash drive. Normally nothing to get excited about, but it actually has two paritions on it. One functions as a normal flash drive like you would suspect, the other serves as a platform to support U3 Smart applications. There's different ways in how these work, but most importantly it lets apps run self contained on the flash drive.
There are a ton of apps available for it, and the quantity seems to keep increasing as people develop more. Trillian has been great, no matter where I go or which computer I am at, i have my AIM/MSN/ICQ chat application, with my login info and chat logs all stored on the card. When I leave that computer, all my data leaves with me, none of it stays on the computer. You can see what kind of apps are available for drives which support U3 by going to the U3 application site.
Additionally I use the normal flash drive partition to store other data such as site photos, contact information and software for programming the RF networks I install. The drive is also lockable with a password(only compatible with windows 2000 and above) so if you loose it, no one else will be able to access the data, the best they can do is format it.
I'd really love to see some rocketry related applications, such as Rocksim, converted to a U3 application for this card, take the card anywhere and share your designs with anyone who has a computer or on any open computer and when you pull the card, your design goes with you! I think it would be great. If you write software for any kind of hobby, you should check out the U3 developer information site, they may even give you a free U3 compatible drive to help development.
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Posted by Jon on Friday, November 24 @ 21:21:48 CST (183 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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Had a good weekend, got out to the R/C field on Sunday and watched the guys flying their large scale sport planes, some pretty impressive stuff. Also drove another 30 mins out to the METRA launch towards the later part of Sunday and saw a few nice launches, love those sparkies. If you live in NY, NJ, or PA I recommend making it to one of their launches, there's a lot to see and a lot of rockets going up, the next one is November 4th and 5th.
I'm working on adding some more rockets to my collection, construction continues slowly on the Harpoon, i just need to sit down and spend some time on it and get the final parts i need. I am also working on getting a PML Endeavor here, shortly, to begin building, looking forward to level 2 launches.
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Posted by Jon on Sunday, October 08 @ 19:12:39 CDT (217 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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| Back into the hobby again |
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Ah, right, getting back into the swing of things with the high power rocketry hobby again. I went out to the METRA launch a couple of weeks of go. There were some spectacular launches and some unfortunate failures, some of the larger rockets seem to have a difficult time. It turned out to be a really nice, sunny, burny day rather than what they forcasted and I got rather red.
There are no photo's of any of the launches unfortunately, but i did do my Level 1 Certification again, successfully, since I lost the paperwork for my initial cert flight last year when I got distracted from important things into other things last year and my National Association of Rocketry membership expired. If I'm not careful I'll end up with the record for the most Level 1 cert flights. Both this years, and last years Level 1 Certification flights were done with a 38mm Loki Research motor with an H144 reload.
I am finishing work on the Hangar 11 Harpoon missile for my Level 2 Certification flight, and I am also building a Public Missiles Ltd. AMRAAM 2 which i bought from Bobbyb / Hangar 11 at the METRA launch. I need to get the 38mm motor mount for it and some other accesories before I can finish construction
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Posted by Jon on Wednesday, September 27 @ 21:47:11 CDT (194 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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| Sorry the site's been kind of slow. I've been in a winter downtime, but with spring around the corner I hope to get back into the swing of things a little bit. The harpoon missile model is almost assembled and I will posting detailed information about that and it's setup.
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Posted by Jon on Friday, March 10 @ 12:12:14 CST (405 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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| Ozark ARTS Flight Computer |
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 I picked up the flight computer from Hangar 11 that I'll be using in the Hangar 11 Harpoon rocket I am building for my Level 2 certification. The flight computer is an Ozark Aerospace ARTS flight computer. If you click the link it takes you to a specs page.
Here's what it looks like:
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Posted by Jon on Sunday, October 09 @ 23:02:51 CDT (1039 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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I made my Level 1 Certification today. I launched the X-Calibur on a Loki H144 and 'medium' delay at the METRA launch, that thing was cooking! Woohoo! It was my first time down at the METRA field, that place is HUGE!
I'll try to get video of the launch up sometime, it should be pretty decent, I had another hard drive failure that I am trying to recover from. BTW: The drive was a 250GB Maxtor ATA133, less than 3 months old, if you're keeping track!
Lots of good folks and nice rockets down there today!
Update:
Here's The Video of the launch
I also picked up a Hangar 11 Harpoon Kit that I will be using for my Level 2 project, looks like fun! Keep an eye out for the build article, it will be updated as I work on the rocket.
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Posted by Jon on Saturday, October 01 @ 18:10:02 CDT (1399 reads)(Read More... | Score: 5) |
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Posted by Jon on Sunday, September 25 @ 18:05:06 CDT (1503 reads)(Read More... | Score: 5) |
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My brother Jason is now getting into rockets, apparently my getting into rockets and blabbing nonstop about them re-ignited that interest that most guys/boys have but just didn't know it yet. Using combustible materials to shoot something into the sky, you know it, you love it! So that's pretty cool that my bro is into them too!
He's going to be writing some stories and build articles for to post here as well.
You can see his first build article on the Estes Swift 220 rocket by clicking this link!
Here's a picture of his first rocket in years!
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Posted by Jon on Sunday, September 25 @ 17:31:30 CDT (2551 reads)(Read More... | Score: 5) |
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| Launched X-Calibur Today on G64-4 |
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I launched the X-Calibur today with the friendly folks of CTRA. I
launched on an Aerotech RMS G64-4, I was going to do my level 1 today
but the trees + wind made me wimp out, I hear the rocket has to be
recovered in order to certify ;) I will try for L1 at the METRA launch
next weekend since there are less scary obstacles for a noob like me :)
The rocket kicked a little on the launch, but this may have
been the wind as it kicked into the wind. The rocket weighs 2.1 pounds
without the motor so maybe 2 1/2 with the motor. CG was 31.5" from the
nose, CP is 36" from the nose so I should have had a 1.8 static margin.
Anywho, here's the launch video!
I
also picked up a 38mm Loki motor from Bobby at Hangar 11. The motor came in my favorite
color too! (blue!)
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Posted by Jon on Sunday, September 25 @ 16:43:47 CDT (3293 reads)(Read More... | Score: 5) |
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| CTRA-NARCON Invitational Day 1 Photos |
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I went to the CTRA-NARCON Invitational with Mike with an invitation to get some helicam
video of a few launches. Mike took some pictures of some of the
launches with his nice camera and they turned out pretty good so I
thought I would post them up here for anyone who wanted to look.
It was a little bit windy out, but a great day in general, lots of
great launches and good folks out there at the launch.
I have provided two links for the pictures, in the high-res link, the
photo's are very large, but original so if you want to save them and
crop them, resize them, view them in that format, that's the link you
want. The lo-res link all of the pictures are 800x600 and
best for just viewing the photos.
Click here for the Hi-Res Photo Gallery
Click here for the Lo-Res Photo Gallery
Here is the video, it's composed of aerial video from our helicam, and ground video from both of our miniDV cameras.
Here's the video we took as well (27Mb, ~4 minutes)
Here are some stills from the aerial portion of the video
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Posted by Jon on Sunday, September 11 @ 17:19:54 CDT (3559 reads)(Read More... | Score: 5) |
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I've posted my Apogee Aspire story to the Builds, Stories, Photo's
MPR section, I hope it is an enjoyable read. I really enjoy big
motors in small rockets. Too much to be healthy. It looks
warped, but my cheap camera has low quality lenses that turns straight
lines into gentle arcs.
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Posted by Jon on Tuesday, September 06 @ 23:39:27 CDT (3492 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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| Finished Helicam Videos Posted |
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I've finished editing the helicam video and included some slow-mo shots
as well. The video comes in two varieties, hi and lo, with a huge size
difference in between. I don't believe in sacrificing (much) video
quality over filesize with the advent of high speed connections, but I
know some people don't have a high speed connection, or would just
prefer not to download a larger file. Alternately, watch the smaller
one and decide if you want to save the high quality one in your
archives.
High-Res Helicam Video (49.8MB)
Low-Res Helicam Video (6.35MB)
If
you plan to watch the large video again at a later date, please
download it to your hard drive by right clicking on the link, and
selecting 'Save tartget as..' in Internet Explorer or "Save Link As.."
in FireFox.
You'll notice some vibration in the video,
helicopters are an assembly of many whirling parts and as such it takes
a lot of work to get rid of all of the vibrations. The heli used in
these videos is a sport machine, the production machines are currently
offline and 'in the shop' but will be back for future shots. The
production machines involve higher machining tolerances, balanced
rotating components and integral self-adjusting counter-balances to
offset engine vibration.
Please do not re-link directly to this video it's considered bandwidth theft, link to my website.
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Posted by Jon on Monday, September 05 @ 22:07:21 CDT (826 reads)(Read More... | Score: 3) |
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| Rocket Launch from Helicam Teaser |
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Posted by Jon on Monday, September 05 @ 17:59:21 CDT (1472 reads)(Read More... | Score: 0) |
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| Public Missiles Ltd, X-Calibur |
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I have posted the build for the PML X-Calibur in the Builds, Stories, Photos section of the website. Most page content and info can be found there for the moment. This rocket will run an F-I motor.
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Posted by Jon on Sunday, September 04 @ 17:07:13 CDT (3334 reads)(Read More... | Score: 3.05) |
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