Spellchecker looking at my use of the word and adding it's wisdom to my typing...... ?The shear size? Nice one.
Spellchecker looking at my use of the word and adding it's wisdom to my typing...... ?The shear size? Nice one.
I'm doing some very remote Australian outback flying on a 100,000+ acre sheep station. We're looking for where the sheep are before sending out bikes & dogs to herd them back in. So I'm trying to get absolute maximum flight times.
Anyone have any accurate figures (not opinions) on with/without lights on?
Cheers
Nice suggestions.
I already use a Marco Polo as we are nowhere near to cell towers.
Had to use it the other day to find the MP when an angry flock of vicious(sic) Galah's dive bombed the MP out of the sky km's away from me.
Fixed wing would work to locate the sheep, but would be useless to actually attempt to herd them in a set direction, the MP is ideal for this work - sort of like a quarter horse.
As I've mentioned in other posts, placing GPS trackers on sheep (tens of thousands of them) is slightly impractical.... but if you'd like to come over with a few thousand of them I can put you up in some really wonderful desert conditions (watch out for the friendly brown snakes) while you chase the sheep around with your glider trying to locate them... to put the GPS trackers on.
I must admit I'm getting a lot of enjoyment out of all these wonderful suggestions.
The M2 batteries have lots of extra juice in them even at 0% so you won't be damaging the batteries by taking them down under 10% to as low as 0%. 0% is still well over 3.5V per cell. Once the battery reaches 0%, you still have 2 minutes of flight time left before any cell drops below 3.0V, which then triggers a forced uncancellable Autoland where you cannot cancel the descent.
We agree completely. I am certainly not recommending flying below 0%, which is 3.56V per cell, but your numbers are a little off, about what happens after reaching 0%. I know from personal experience (corroborated by an independent YouTube test to below 0% in a hover, until forced uncancellable landing), that you still have between 1.5 and 2.0 minutes, after reaching 0% battery, before a forced, uncancellable Autoland takes place, triggered by the lowest cell voltage drops below 3.0V. Flight is still possible during that period, and actually prolongs battery life over a mere hover, as expected.I would not recommend this. Once you get below ~3.53V voltage begins to drop at a quickly-increasing rate.
At 3.50V, you should be landing immediately. Any less-than-gentle maneuver has the potential to cause a catastrophic voltage drop.
You should never get to the forced autoland at 3.0V and it takes only about a minute to get there from 3.5V
If you get to 3V without falling out of the sky it is literally only a matter of seconds before you do.