When to Contact Montana During Testing

[jonsaken]

I would like to verify when we need to contact Montana during our testing.  I saw a message saying we don't need to let you know anymore if we are just testing the Iridium.  I took this to mean ground testing.  Is that correct?  We were not successful recently getting the Iridium to show up on the tracking site, and had trouble getting the ground station to point correctly.  However, that may have been due to terrain.  We are not sure.

We would like to try a test fiight very soon.  Do we need to contact you before that?

Just in case, we are trying for Sunday, Oct. 22nd if the weather holds.

Thank you.

[David MSGC]

Test flights we do not need a notice, for actual flights I like to have some notice so that everything is running for sure and you can track your payload.
If it is not showing up on the website that means packets from Iridium are not being sent. Packets not being sent means there is no GPS lock or Iridium lock on your modem. The GPS LED needs to be blinking or solid and the Iridium LED needs to be solid. There have been occasions, though rarely, that a packet takes 10 or more minutes to go through.

[jonsaken]

Thanks for the reply.

We did have both locked. Nothing showed up. However, we did not necessarily wait the full 10 minutes. We will try that next.

Thanks again.