Tonight was another productive work session at the hangar.  Paul Hove
and Ray Peterson joined me.

It was a very clear evening and we looked at both Jupiter and Saturn in
the eastern sky using my old 2.5" refractor telescope.  I didn't even
know that they would be visible yet but found them just by looking
(found Jupiter on my first guess, took me two tries to find Saturn).
They are pretty close together, just like last fall.

I showed-off some bargain priced Ready-To-Fly rocket starter kits that I
got cheap at Petter's Warehouse this week.  If anyone needs a rocket,
pad, and launch controller, I've got 5 sets for sale at $6 each.  So
there's no excuse for anyone not to have a rocket and pad.

Ray and Paul built a video down-link receiver using my X10 video
reciever and a parabolic satelite dish antenna I got at a garage sale.
We tested out to several hundred feet along the ground.  Should work
better for air-to-ground reception from a rocket.  The tiny 12v power
supply for the X10 video camera/transmitter works well. It is made of 2
6v "N" cells in a single AA battery holder.  The whole transmitter and
battery will fit in a 2.5" diamter payload tube about 5" long.

My experiment for the evening was to design an rocket parachute
deployment mechanism that is not dependent upon a pyrotechnic charge.
To avoid excessive drift, most advanced rockets use blackpowder ignited
by an electronic altimeter to eject a small drouge chute at apogee, then
a main recovery chute at a much lower altitude.  The problem with this
is that blackpowder is not legal for use in anything except an antique
guns and can be hard to get.  My technique uses a pressurized bottle
sealed with a burst-disk with an Estes ignitor touching the disk.  When
an electric signal fires the ignitor, it causes the disk to rupture
allowing the compressed air to pressurize the body tube and eject the
nose-cone and parachute.  One of the tests bounced the simulated
parachute off of the 16' high ceiling.   Early results are very
promising but need more research into the composition of the burst
disk.  Thin styrofoam sheet worked ok but didn't rupture very well with
the ignitor (to my surprise - I expected styrofoam to vaporize in the
presence of flame).  Multiple layers of plastic film seemed to work
better, though I ran out of ignitors for testing.