Vance Martin

My hobby & rocketry journey has been somewhat typical in some ways, but unique in others. On the surface I might be described as typical 'born again rocketeer', but I prefer to think of myself as 'always been a geek' and my geekiness just changed forms a couple times over the years.

I first got involved in rocketry as a kid in the typical way; seeing model rockets at the local hobby shop, and getting into it with a friend. As I moved into middle and high school, and the internet became more prevalent, I discovered mid and high power rocketry via some online rocketry resources. At that point I started building and launching mid power rockets. While in college I built a PML 1/4 Scale Patriot rocket to use for level 1, but there were no clubs I had the means to get to that had the space for high power, so I never did a certification launch, and that rocket basically sat in the corner without ever getting launched.

After college when I started working, I was traveling around a lot for work, and got into ham radio (callsign N3VEM), and had a portable station in my vehicle so that I could play radio while I was out and about for work. I'm also very much both a software and hardware 'tinkerer' so building radio-related projects turned out to be a lot of fun, and is still what I would call my 'primary hobby.'

My re-introduction to rocketry happened about a year ago, when my 2 older kids found the Patriot stashed in the corner of our storage room and said 'What is this!!' - and just like that we started building up a fleet of little Estes kits. At that point I decided that it would be fun to combine the 2 hobbies, and start tinkering with radio and electronic payloads for our rockets. I knew that 'off the shelf' stuff was available, but being a tinkerer, I wanted to build my own, and I wanted to target mid-power sized rockets with my projects, since I still live in the same town, and still don't have easy access to a club with a high-power launch site.

I'm still very much a rocketry noob, but I'm having a blast dabbling around with building the rockets, and hacking around at hardware and software for the rockets' payloads.