FPV Mysteries, Unraveled!

Well, I keep unraveling more and more mysteries as I learn more. First, I have determined that my AUW Multiplex Easy Star with full video equipment and batteries has gained an impressive 11oz, to top out at 37.5oz (that is just over 2 lbs!!!), which leap-frogs it into second place, just behind my Tiger 2 for highest wing loading at 14.5oz/sq-ft. Second, thanks AGAIN to Thomas Black at DPCAV, my red hue problems are because of some "intelligent" feature in the DPC 480A Sony CCD that reverts settings to the manual color values until its DSP triggers AWB to reset every time you power up. More importantly, I can FORCE the resample if I just go into the menu and transition through the menu to Fixed->Manual->ATW->AWB. Viola! Nice cool normal colors! But bummer to have to redo that everytime I power up. Thomas mentioned it might be better to set some manual values or try ATW. Anyway, I flew tonight with the forced menu reset after power up to AWB.

Third, I still haven't found the right video cable for the Myvu goggles (borrowed another friend's camcorder mini-DIN to RCA cable, and it was yet a THIRD different one). Hopefully Gordon finds the right one tomorrow so I can FINALLY fly actual FPV without peering at a small 3" diagnal camcorder screen. Fourth, when you live and fly anywhere near a semi-major airport, and you fly FPV, you'd better pay attention to low flying aircraft. I came relatively close to a passing Horizon Airlines Bombardier Q400 on final approach tonight (close being half a mile or more at the closest). I'm still not sure if I show up on radar or not, but it explains why I suddenly was getting a lot of video interference and getting servo glitches (maybe?). I'm not in the direct flight path, and I'm outside the resticted area, I think, and I'm intentionally keeping the plane away from any obvious other traffic, but, probably need to find somewhere else to fly fpv. Fifth, I switched my RTH turn over to the rudder to maybe make it less "roll-sensitive", and it did help, but because I couldn't use the goggles, I couldn't read any of the menus and change any of the settings while using the RTH. So, it still ended up rolling clear over into a death spiral, eventually, but it did turn toward me and drop altitude. I need to adjust the proportional gains down and see how it works. Sixth, while this isn't FPV, and the mystery isn't "unraveled", I just wanted to comment, for the record, that Windows Movie maker SUCKS. It crashes at every chance possible (usually just after a lot of editing but before the automated save). Sigh.

Last thing, is it seems like the next big thing I need to tackle/work on, is proper RTH operation. Here is a good description of PID control, and how to best set up the proportional, integral, and derivative gains. Specifically, starting with proportional ONLY (zero the gains on Integral and Derivative), and increasing it until it oscillates, then drop the value in half, and add in integral to get the desired worst case turn completion, followed by adding in derivative to avoid over shoot. Honestly, I think derivative gain is going to have to be dang low, given how slow/variable the GPS reads can be.