Larry, Ray, James, Ian, Glenn, Keith, Andrew and Brian all hung out on OMSI's "front deck" - right outside the main entrance - and talked up the full PSAS display, complete with launch tower, rockets, and avionics demo.
We set up around 9:00am, and talked with folks the whole day through. Glenn and Keith both came down, and we tried tuning the rocket body to 2m. It turned out to be a very good 156MHz antenna - about 8 MHz too high to be in the amateur radio band - but even at 148MHz the VSWR was still 1.7 so it looks like Glenn and Andrew have to admit to Tim that he was... uh... errr... not wrong. The attachment points were both in the recovery module (one at the top of the cutout, and one most of the way down the cutout) so that's a big win in terms of keeping the modules independent.
Thanks to Keith and Laura for the yummy ice cream sandwiches, and to Ian for yummy pizza.
And congratulations to Brian and Amy, who made it home unscathed with LV2 strapped to - on display, if you will - the launch tower's launch rail on the back of their truck. Now that's publicity ;)
Addendum: KPTV (Fox Channel 12) shot some footage of our equipment and interviewed Andrew about the group. They didn't use the interview but they sure used the footage of our equipment: Here is the news piece on OMSI's Space Day: psas on kptv 07-19-2003.mpg. We thought that the news piece lacked information, so we here's the same pice with some overlayed comments: psas on kptv 07-19-2003 w comments.mpg.
Notes for next year:
- Don't forget to bring cards
- More chairs; get 3 tables (2 for display, 1 for work)
- Move ashtray away from exhibit (cough, cough, hack)