Mile High Club!!!

So, I finally made it up over a mile. 5280ft above the ground. And on that SAME day, I flew two other ~20 minute flights. The last one, of which, also got up to about a mile high, but also was almost 11,000ft (over 2 miles!!!) line of sight away. And the subsequent glide back down was long and peaceful. I had a great time. I'm now pushing about 2ft/mAh of battery with the 2835 Turnigy inrunner and an APC 6x4E prop and around a 40oz plane AUW with 2600mAh lipo. Everything went well. I'm still getting some ground loop noise on my second channel video rx with the 3dbi omni antenna. I've decided I'm just going to have to isolate the Eagle Eyes from the rx's with two separate lipo batteries.

I have also decided I am going to have to really think about trying to get some of the gyro's I got (at least one on the roll axis) installed in the airframe. I think I'll move my AUX2 to ch9 (which can only be a switch, not analog) and then put the gain on the gyro on one of the dials where AUX2 was and play with it (have done some of this on my Tiger2). It was really windy up over 4000ft (over 30mph from the West), and it really wanted to pitch and roll in the wind, plus something is really making it want to pull/roll right when under thrust. I assume the video camera and pan/tilt isn't great aerodynamics, and I've noticed when I pan over all the way and tilt down, it really wants to make the plane roll the opposite way. It is better when I don't have any power applied, but having a gyro stabilizer on would really help. I'm wondering if it could help the RTH too. If I put one on the pitch axis too, I think I could work out a switch that would mix my elevator settings in to try to have just the right amount of climb (or maybe I just move the trim up a little) and it would do a nice steady climb for my altitude runs.

Also, on that RTH note, when the wind speed is faster than your glide speed, RTH really doesn't work. Grin. There were times when I was gliding into the wind, and doing 20mph backward, according to the GPS. Which makes the plane chevron point East AND makes the course heading indicate 90. Yeah, and that really screws with which way it thinks it should turn to fly home when RTH is engaged. Really want an integrated airspeed pitot tube, compass and barometric altimeter (the latter which I have, and which is linearly off from the GPS altimeter by about 5%, or 200ft off at 4000ft AGL..not sure which one is wrong, but the both start the same, and end the same on the flight, but grow to be off from each other through the climb).

The tracker is working great, though. I couldn't be happier with it, except maybe to be able to set the "home" position easier than the 180 clicks I have to do in the OSD Pro menu when I want the center to point South instead of North...

Last, I've moved to using MPG4 x264 encoding in XviD4PSP 5, specifically the x264 Q21 DXVA-HD-HQS preset profile, which ends up trying to do a lot of processing to fix how hard of an encode FPV is. With a rolling background, fixed text on the foreground, and a nose of the plane remaining fixed, it is EXTREMELY harsh on encoder to find a good low bit-rate compression (so much for YouTube. I've been frustrated, but so far, this compression gets me down to about a 5kb/s bitrate (call it ~50MB/minute final file), and a good job finding the best macroblock encode without being fuzzy or obviously crap. And it seems to do ok when uploaded then to YouTube for compression.

Still have a big wish list for the OSD Pro firmware:

• Flight Timer.
• Date/Time display popup/rotation with flight timer every 5 minutes.
• Ability to select ribbon graphics for only ONE of the OSD Pro screens.
• Servo Deflections show up only when RTH engages or below certain altitude (like you can set GPS coords).
• Direct entry of RTH settings values.
• Dynamic scale on the virtual overhead map.
• Reset OSD Pro Home location and mAh from menu option.
• Clear eLogger memory from menu option.