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Since we did not recover the rocket or payload, we cannot verify this was the failure we experienced with 100% certainty, but no other proposed theories explain why both BRB's lost lock at the same time and continued to send good APRS packets.
Potential Root Causes
- Lack of knowledge
- Unknown failure mode prior to flight
- Hard to mitigate short of a test flight
- Launched too late
- More recovery time would have given us a better chance to find the rocket without GPS
- Lacked directional antenna
- A directional antenna could have been used to get a heading using signal strength from the APRS packets that were being transmitted
- Our recovery teams had dipole antennas making it impossible to get a heading from a single point
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