Jon's Rocket Hobby Site - High Power, Mid Power and Low Power Rockets

Been a while, and a word on suggested links.

Whew, been a while, a year TO THE DAY actually, since I've been able to update this page, summer is coming back however, so I hope to have some new things to report for this season. Between maintaining my new blog (accessible from http://www.thaltech.com/ ) and my house I've been pretty darn busy.

The links section is still open for submission if you'd like to help get your URL out to other sites and improve it's visibility. Just click on the Web Links link here or on the left and use the features to submit a new one. They don't show immediately as I always verify them first.

If you click the 'Read More' link at the bottom of this post you can participate on a poll for the 'rocket economy'. I'm mostly just curious if people are keeping up with the hobby or if time/money or interest means they'll be doing less this year, please let me know!

Send Your Name To The Moon!

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!

Overdue Update

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.

NASA's STEREO First Photo's

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."

Police Reality Shows to get more entertaining!

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.

One Hot Flashlight

Ever want a flashlight that can set things on fire? Check out this converted maglight with a 100 watt bulb running 140 watts on 12 NiMh batteries.

Still Traveling

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.

Pushing Portable Applications for Hobbyist Apps

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.

Good Weekend

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.

Back into the hobby again

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