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Hi Joe!  Great to have you around.  We certainly have a shortage of EE knowledge here at the moment, so that part of your skill set will be a huge help – and of course the mechanical stuff is always welcome too.

Have you had a look around the site/Wiki yet?  Right now the most "real" of our projects, the one where we could put people to good use almost straight away, is OHKLA, a hybrid rocket project.  However, we very nearly undertook a CubeSat project recently, and I for one am keen to see that project revived, and with your experience in satellite comms your arrival may be a good time to start down that road.

With regards to OKHLA and electronics, we've basically made no progress so far on an avionics suite whose only tasks are to record data from sensors like GPS, IMUs, barometers, magentometers, etc., so that we can verify maximum altitude after recovery, and communication of real-time GPS coordinates to facilitate said recovery.  We have had an offer from the Portland State Aerospace Society for them to largely take care of this part of the OHKLA project, however if we have interested and competent people in CSTART too there's no reason we can't make it a joint work.

With regards to OHKLA and mechanics, we've just chosen our propellants (polyethylene and nitrous oxide) so now we are starting to move more onto designing the engine itself.  The combustion chamber is probably the next logical step and I think the first move we're likely to make on that front is looking at the relative pros and cons of candidate materials (steel, aluminium, carbon composite, etc.) in terms of their cost, ease of acquisition, ease of machining/welding, ability to withstand pressure and temperture etc.

You are very welcome to help out on either or both of these fronts.  Let me know where your interests lie and I will try to point you in the appropriate directinos.

With regards to the fledgling CubeSat project, we're more or less at a blank slate with that one, but we have at least one other member who is very interested in that project so if you were more interested in that you guys (and, I'm sure, others!) could begin some preliminary research and requirement drafting on that front.

Once again, welcome to the team!  Please do not hesitate to ask any questions or make any comments.  We'll do our best to make sure you can find something to work on which plays to your skill sets and is interesting for you.

You certainly have come at an interesting time!  We are desperately trying to get ourselves rolling again after a bit of a stagnation point, and so new members are very welcome and valuable at this time.

I have just now made a proposal for a lot of organisational changes, including reinstating the CubeSat project, but for the time being perhaps it makes sense to focus on OHKLA, which is probably what one should call our "main" project right now.

What sort of electronics experience do you have, particularly with things like microcontrollers?  I think our vision for the OHKLA avionics has basically been something like an Arduino board which reads in data from peripherals (GPS etc.) and writes that data to some kind of storage medium like an SD card of USB stick.  And then there's the problem of broadcasting GPS coordinates after landing, which is primarily a radio comms task.  Which of these two aspects do you feel is something you'd enjoy working on most, or perhaps a better question: which is more in line with your experience and expertese?