Ham Rocketry Collaboration

Ham Radio and Model Rocketry Interns join forces

The Model Rocketry intern team collaborated with the Ham Radio intern team to assemble, solder, and test avionic control boards that were to be flown on the upcoming launch.

So, over the last two weeks on Thursday, both teams congregated at the room adjacent to the W5RRR shack to utilize the soldering tools and equipment we had available to assist in the build by the various student interns across both committees.

The avionics boards, designed by Sid Banchongsirichareon, was a stretch initiative to include a rocket roll stabilization using canards on their rocket.  Hats off to the progressive and aggressive effort that was undertaken in only a few weeks.  Sid, the lead, embraced doing things that were “hard” and welcomed his team’s initiative to add this feature to the rocket’s trajectory profile.

Some of the interns had limited/no soldering skills so it was a terrific exercise to provide instruction and skills development along the way.  Jeff AB4ME produced some really useful (and cool) 3D printed several vices which aided the hold down of the PCBs and parts during soldering.  See Jeff for details how he did it.

Jeff AB4ME and Kelvin K5KGH provided most of the hosting guidance across the 2 weeks of support, while Paul KJ5JIO and W5OC monitored on the last day of the activity, where the Rocketry group brought in the rocket itself for a fit check with the electronics.

During a brief respite in-between heavy activity on the last Thursday’s build, we had a chance to offer a tour of the W5RRR shack to some of the Rocketry Interns. 15m had a strong path to Australia and we worked VK3 while intern Jack Boyko manner the microphone and had a nice conversation with him. 

The Rocket launch on April 25 was a huge success.  It went up straight and came back down to earth safely.  Congrats to the NASA JSC Rocketry Intern Committee

From Gabriel Farris KG5IVS

” It went up at least a thousand feet and recovered perfectly
We achieved our goals of getting sick onboard video and avionics flight data
Unfortunately due to a small issue, the canard roll program did not activate on launch. For next time!”

This overall collaboration perhaps opened up some future joint work between intern groups.