Hercules! Hercules!

I finally finished the edit of the flight I had in Snow Canyon! It turned out great!
But I wont waist time talking about it...here it is:



But what I will spend time talking about is the road trip I took with a couple buddies down to Moab Utah.
IT WAS AMAZING!
My Hercules flew great! (maybe a little under powered.....but a different motor/prop would fix that.) My system preformed ok, there are a few things I need to change. (video RX antenna, uhf TX antenna)
Hopefully I will get all the footage put together into a video soon.
In the mean time here are a some pictures form the trip:

My Hercules FPV setup (Chainlink UHF/DX6i, Rembizi OSD, Headplay goggles, 1.28ghz video, Pixim flying camera, and GoPro HERO HD cam.)

 

Even without color the Hercules looks pretty bad-A in the air!

Going west on Potash Road we found a cool gap in the top of a cliff that Todd just had to fly through. (you can see it in the upper right) He took two runs through it...tapped a wingtip on one run and cleared it on the second, it was AWESOME! I didn't attempt it. :-[

We did a good amount of tandem flying, witch was super fun! This is Todd's wing flying at the Balancing Bolder on the Shafer trail.

Corona Arch - 140 feet high, 105 feet wide

Todd was able to fly through it a few times, then he attempted to shoot through Bowtie arch (witch was right next to it)...it didn't end well. I would have taken my wing through it but I was busy rappelling off the top of it. It was CRAZY!

Todd gave his quad a try. He would have flown it more but one of the motors was giving him problems. So we didn't risk any more flights.

Even though we didn't get as many flights in as we would have liked and we had a few mishaps/dumb mistakes. The trip was a blast, we learned allot, and we will be allot more prepared for future trips.

I've been really busy lately, so I haven't taken the time to post anything on my little blog. But good things are coming! I'm working on two different videos. One to tell the story of the Reaper crash, and the other one will be of my flying adventures(and crash) in St.George Utah. (witch will be awesome!) I'm also going on a road trip to Moab in a week. Hope to get some great footage down there.

A crash to end it?

I crashed my reaper up a mountain....again. It started out to be a beautiful afternoon FPV flying session. I got one ok flight in, my buddy got an amazing flight in, and I started in to another. I was just getting finished with a big climb to try to catch a fluffy little cloud, my battery was getting low so I turned around and started to make a run into an amazing little canyon. I wasn't thinking about the fact that it would put me out of line of sight. Long story short, I lost video and it went down.....

After 3 hours of brutal hiking and one chance phone call I found my Reaper! It was sitting there in a tree/bush...thing 1700 feet up the mountain. Considering the speed and height there wasn't that much damage. Nothing a little glue/tape couldn't fix. The best part of all was that my Go-Pro wasn't broke! (but it did lose the last 10sec of the crash video.)

I will be making a little video of the adventure some time soon.

Proximity Flying

I have conquered the mountain!! Ever sense the day I crashed on the mountainside I have wanted to get back and show that mountain that I'm not afraid! With the help of my new Chainlink UHF system, Cloverleaf antenna and a good flying buddy or two I did just that. But then I didn't stop there..........this is only the start.....of things to come >:-D
Hope you enjoy

Still Here...

I have been crazy busy with work, family, new video game, and building my new FPV wing. So my little blog has been suffering in the pit of no new content. So here is a quick update:

I started flying with a fellow FPV enthusiast that is excited to really get out there and fly hard. He and I had a great little flying session a few days ago and got some sweet footage of rocky mountainsides and some fall colors.
I'm waiting until get some more video recorded before I make up a video of it. Hopefully it will be worth the wait. :-]

I have been dragging my feet a bit on my new FPV wing, but after having a great time flying the other day it's really motivated me to get my butt in gear and get it going. Here are a few picks of the build.

Here is my new wing compared to the current one. Hopefully it will get longer than 8min of flight time:-]

After I glued the halves together and cut out a space to mount the motor in a little ways.

Got the control surfaces cut down and test fitted the wiglets. I think it will look bad A!

So I will be working like mad to try and get it put together and get it flying! Hopefully it will fly with the way I'm setting it up. (as far as I know I'm the first one to try building this wing with a pusher motor instead of duel front motors.)

Cloverleaf antena

I built a couple cloverleaf antennas for my 1.28ghz video transmitter. Instructions can be found at RCExplorer and on RC Groups. (I like the instructions at RCExplorer better, they were less confusing)

So far I have only had one flight using my cloverleaf antenna (my Fall colors 1 video), but it preformed quite nice!

The only time I got any fuzz in the video was when I flew too far off to one side. (my RX antenna is a directional yagi) But so long as I stayed out in front of my antenna the video was crystal clear. Still need to do some distance testes though to see what the limits are.
It looks a little ghetto with the black tape, I will figure out a better way to mount soon. :-] 

There is a chill in the air....and...the GRIM!!

Well I had a super fun time on Saturday flying FPV with the Grim. I was driving home from bowling with the Fam and spotted a ray of light shining through the clouds on a dull gray rainy day. So I called up a local flying buddy and we were able to go hit the slopes before the sun went down.