FOG-BOUND over CHRISTMAS 2024

Well, it turned out to be a very disappointing Christmas holiday. I had hoped for at least one day's flying on the hill in the light winds that were forecast to make a video but the weather Gods conspired against us yet again. I had planned for ten days possible flying over Xmas. Sure, it was mild enough, no snow, light winds for a change, but there was FOG. This not only grounded us on the hill but it wasn't much better on the flying field either. We tried twice on the hill following the weather forecast but on one occasion it was completely wrong and on the other the the FOG cleared far too late in the afternoon as the clag set in.

Brother David and I, along with Mike Shellim optimistically made our way to the top of the hill but, alas, we were proved to be foggy fools. At least Mike flew once trying out his latest program on EdgeTX or ELRS whatever the latest transmitter and software he was using.

On the flying field, it wasn't much better, bro was playing with/setting up his latest technical wizardry model on the field and had one flight. I believe it is called a Hee Wing T2 running twin motors on a 6S Lipo.

It has all the gizmos on it, masses of radio and battery telemetry, GPS, flight controller, pan and tilt camera an a small Lidar unit for auto-landing. A very well designed RTF foam model that clips together so well.

ON THE FLAT FIELD

There is a lot of electronic fuzz (I call it) around this setup. and quite a bit of software running as well. I'll list some it here but I can't explain what it all does.

So, the high brightness Samsung tablet is showing ArduPilot (flight controller) and Mission Planner (for way-points). Only the screen is used on the tablet, the computing is done on a small ACEMagic solid state memory Celeron minicomputer not shown in my image.

Bluetooth is (2.4GHz) running for something or other and the Radiomaster transmitter is running MLRS on 868MHz. Google maps provides the map images on the main part of the screen. Oh, I forgot there's a Smart phone in the list somewhere for something.

During autonomous flight, if you wear FPV goggles while the model is in the air the gimballed camera mounted on the nose can be swivelled around and up and down.

Quite a lot to sort out and a lot of it sometimes crashes for the silliest of reasons because there are so many parameters that can be altered and if you get it wrong, well...

The inside of the model is cavernous, but it has to be to accommodate all the electronics. Aptly, for Christmas, I can say that the inside lights up like a Christmas tree with red, green, blue and white l.e.d.s twinkling away.