TECHNICAL INFORMATION
What altimeter should I buy ?
This is a difficult question. Probably the best answer would be to buy what you can afford. All of the altimeters are under 200 UK pounds, and with prices starting well under 100 UK pounds, then the choice is mainly limited to what you can afford.
The cheapest altimeter by far, that Slack Pete's Rockets sell, is the G-Whiz LC altimeter. This will suffice for most rocket flights where all you require is the peak altitude, and want to open a parachute at apogee. As well as being used as the main altimeter by many rocketeers, because of its low cost, it is also used as a backup altimeter for high power, high altitude flights, by some of the more experienced rocketeers. The Deluxe version of the G-Whiz LC adds considerably to the functionality by enabling both a drogue and a main parachute deployment to be controlled, as well as staging or air started clustering flights.
Occupying the mid range is the well tried and tested ALTACC altimeter/accelerometer. If you decide you want to record altitude and acceleration data for the whole flight rather than just measure the single peak altitude figure, then the ALTACC is a superb choice. The fact that it can be rapidly plugged into most airframes like the G-Whiz is a major benefit. The ALTACC is a popular choice amongst serious high power rocketeers.
The undoubted flagship is the R-DAS altimeter/accelerometer. In fact, calling it an altimeter/accelerometer is doing it an injustice, since it is more like a full blown flight computer. As well as the connectors for communicating with a PC, the R-DAS has an expansion port which enables separate igniter boards, a telemetry module, a GPS module and an Infra-red communications module to be plugged into it. It has 6 analogue inputs, 4 digital inputs as well as the altitude and acceleration sensors. If you want the maximum flexibility, then the R-DAS is the altimeter of choice.
