Sunday was pretty a pretty good day of Science & Technology Adventure.

It was too windy to launch larger rockets, so Glen stayed home to work
on his rocket telemetry transmitter.  Ray, John, & TJ were tied up at
the Air Guard Museum most of the day and cancelled.

My father, Paul, arrived around noon and I demonstrated the rocket
projects and water rockets.  We had several 2 liter water rockets
launched at about 90psi that must have gone about 250 feet.
Interestingly, experiments with different water to air ratios didn't
seem to have as great an effect with the 2 liter rockets as it does on
the restricted nozzle 1/2 liter ones.  Even just an air-only burst gave
about the same 200' range.
Another discovery was that not all 2 liter bottles are created equally.
After a premature launch during pressurization, we found that some
bottles have a smaller lip surrounding the top nozzle.

Gary Bucher and his son Kevin arrived at about 2pm and built two water
rockets, one 1/2 liter and a 2 liter.  Both flew great, much to the
delight of 5 yr old Kevin.  Gary invented a new way of mounting the
styrofoam fins to the wood dowel extensions: instead of cutting four
fins and trying to get pairs to stay ridgid at 90 degrees to each other
on each stick, he just made two fins and put a 1/2 depth cut in each so
it could be folded to about 120 deg  and taped to the stick along the
cut.  This made them nice and ridgid.

Later we flew my steerable kite and attached the X10 video
camera/transmitter that my Dad & I had been rigging up.  The transmitter
was powered by two 'N'-cell sized 6v batteries forced into a single AA
battery holder.  It worked very well.  The reciever fed a portable 4"
b&W tv.  Both the reciever and tv are 12v and were tested also on some
small 12v lead-acid batteries I have.
At first the kite was wildly unstable with the extra weight.  A long
wind-sock added as a tail helpped to make it controllable again.

The Air to Ground image from the kite was marginal.  It was neat but the
camera lens' focal length is so short that even from about 50-80'
objects on the ground were pretty small.  A more serious problem was
that the antennas proved to be very sensitive to alignment with each
other.  This resulted in an intermittant signal as the kite moved.
The range seems ok, at least a couple of hundred feet even along the
ground.

We did not try the parabolic dish reciever antenna yet, which should
help the reception.
So that's high on the list of projects for next time.  The dish should
have a tripod too.

We took out an Estes AltiTrack unit to practice measuring the altitude
of the water rockets, but found that the unit needs considerable
assembly so we didn't use it.

Later, after Gary & Kevin left, Dad and I made a MicroMaxx launch of one
of the cheap little plastic rockets that came with the kit.  Probably
got to 60-80' and did get a reasonable streamer deployment but the
streamer was not enough to break the rocket's stability, so it continued
a balistic dive into the grass.  Undamaged though.

Not too bad considering the wind and threatening rain.

-Jeff