There were three objectives for this flight:
1) General check-out of my new Mini-2, Phoenix.
2) Determine minimum altitude for noise abatement
3) Determine the floor of the Savage Aerodrome
Mission accomplished!
1) This was a difficult firmware update, which took a long time. When it was done, and I went to go fly, the auto-pre-flight failed. It said it didn't have an SD card, which it didn't, but that didn't strike me as a reason to not fly. But the GPS also wouldn't link. Something was clearly wrong, so I shut everything down, and then rebooted. It then told me that it hadn't finished installing the update. So I had it do that, and tried again, but I was still getting the "No GPS" error. But after a couple of minutes the GPS woke up, and I took off. Flies great! To my surprise, when it does those long firmware updates, the beastie gets hot.
2) I am blessed to live in a beautiful and sparsely populated canyon. When I take off to the east, down the canyon, there are no houses at all between me and the bottom. There are no houses at all on the other side of the canyon. But I wanted to do a structured test to check the noise level at various altitudes. At 100 ft AGL it was vastly quieter than at ground level, but it still might bother someone who was sitting outside. At 200 ft you could still hear it, but only if your hearing is as good as mine, which is uncommon. So I'm going to set 200 ft as the minimum AGL altitude for flights that aren't straight down the canyon.
3) The ground slopes off quickly to the east, and I wanted to set a floor where you can reliably get GPS. After my last flight, I paid a lot more attention to the GPS icon, which I can finally see with the screen visibility enhancements. You can safely go down to 30 ft below the launch point, and still have reliably GPS. You could probably go lower, but I have no intention of doing a GPS failure map. I'll have to re-read the manual section that deals with GPS...what do the little numbers next to the satellite icon mean?
At 98º F, I was pretty close to the max operating temp of 104º F for the Mini-2, but the takeoff and climb (from a 5000 ft base) was prompt and strong at that density altitude. Plenty of reserve power left, and I'm still in "Normal" mode.
After completing the mission objectives, I decided to call it a day. It's supposed to climb up above 100º F this afternoon, which is too hot for the beastie, and WAY too hot for me! I'll hit the skies again earlier tomorrow AM.
Life is good!
TCS
1) General check-out of my new Mini-2, Phoenix.
2) Determine minimum altitude for noise abatement
3) Determine the floor of the Savage Aerodrome
Mission accomplished!
1) This was a difficult firmware update, which took a long time. When it was done, and I went to go fly, the auto-pre-flight failed. It said it didn't have an SD card, which it didn't, but that didn't strike me as a reason to not fly. But the GPS also wouldn't link. Something was clearly wrong, so I shut everything down, and then rebooted. It then told me that it hadn't finished installing the update. So I had it do that, and tried again, but I was still getting the "No GPS" error. But after a couple of minutes the GPS woke up, and I took off. Flies great! To my surprise, when it does those long firmware updates, the beastie gets hot.
2) I am blessed to live in a beautiful and sparsely populated canyon. When I take off to the east, down the canyon, there are no houses at all between me and the bottom. There are no houses at all on the other side of the canyon. But I wanted to do a structured test to check the noise level at various altitudes. At 100 ft AGL it was vastly quieter than at ground level, but it still might bother someone who was sitting outside. At 200 ft you could still hear it, but only if your hearing is as good as mine, which is uncommon. So I'm going to set 200 ft as the minimum AGL altitude for flights that aren't straight down the canyon.
3) The ground slopes off quickly to the east, and I wanted to set a floor where you can reliably get GPS. After my last flight, I paid a lot more attention to the GPS icon, which I can finally see with the screen visibility enhancements. You can safely go down to 30 ft below the launch point, and still have reliably GPS. You could probably go lower, but I have no intention of doing a GPS failure map. I'll have to re-read the manual section that deals with GPS...what do the little numbers next to the satellite icon mean?
At 98º F, I was pretty close to the max operating temp of 104º F for the Mini-2, but the takeoff and climb (from a 5000 ft base) was prompt and strong at that density altitude. Plenty of reserve power left, and I'm still in "Normal" mode.
After completing the mission objectives, I decided to call it a day. It's supposed to climb up above 100º F this afternoon, which is too hot for the beastie, and WAY too hot for me! I'll hit the skies again earlier tomorrow AM.
Life is good!
TCS
