Over a barrel...

I had quite a few opportunities to practice this week and also explored my range a bit more, trying to overcome the fear of the wall of static when the video transmitter is nearing the limit of its range. I won't upload any videos of that, because although the grounds at work are very pretty from above, it's basically just laps of a very similar route over and over...

I also got a bit braver and had my first attempt in acro mode yesterday and did a couple of barrel rolls. I had another few more goes today and all was well, before I decided to try a forward roll... and totally misjudged where the horizon was! :(

Slow down... or the tree gets it!

It was very windy tonight - you can see one part where I'm really fighting against the wind to keep it from slamming into me, so I decided to practise some low flying through trees. I got a bit too cocky and coming in hot on a 180° turn, I sideswiped a small tree. Ooops!

Good fun flying in the wind, although I went through more props in an hour today than I have in the past week!

Mid air prop failure

I guess this is a bit more newsy than the other posts where I'm basically gushing over baby steps towards flying! So, I decided that warranted installing movie maker and having a quick bash!

Anyway, I had two props fail tonight whilst in mid air, 10 minutes apart. After the second, I decided just to swap all the remaining props rather than having it happen further away - I was pretty lucky that it fell to ground only about 10m away, as I'd gone quite a long way, and even more so that it landed on tall grass for a soft landing both times.

EDIT: Chris suggested I needed to watch this, but given that the props were probably bent from having just crashed into the goalposts, I don't think I'm quite at this level of fussiness yet!

FPV is awesome! :)

I ordered some FPV goggles which arrived a week ago tooday, but as I was ill I only tried them out in the house until I ventured out on Tuesday evening and attempted to circumnavigate a tree. I failed to make it round once!

After reviewing the footage and realising I was flying far too low, I went out again and managed 5 laps on my first attempt, before some dog owners came and got too close for comfort, so I retreated to another area and just practised handling for a bit. Until I landed in a puddle and ruined an ESC.

Last night, I fitted the replacement ESC and this lunchtime I had a practice on a fairly crowded field - 4 quads flying at once - and again this evening, when I had a glorious time with the field to myself and able to explore a bit knowing that absolutely everyone had gone home for the weekend. So, here's my footage of my first real FPV exploration:

The videos are all much the same, although by 6.30pm the sun was getting pretty low and on the return part of the lap it was getting pretty hard to see anything...