Over the last year I've been working on a project dubbed "The Radio Rocket." I have 4 young kids that got interested in model rocketry, which was a past hobby of mine, so as I got re-engaged in it with them, I decided to add a ham radio twist! We built both APRS and 70cm LoRa into the first version of the rocket, set up a basic ground station to receive the data and be able to do messaging through the rocket, using it like a LoRa repeater, and a node-red based dashboard for viewing the live data. Everything in this projects used off-the-shelf micro controllers and parts, only basic hand tools, and very basic coding.

We had a glorious crash of version 1, which we learned quite a bit from, and we are now incorporating those learning's into version 2 of the rocket!

It's a great example of something 'unique' that can be done in ham radio, by someone with just the basic technician license!