Fourth Flight
My fourth FPV flight was a
smashing success!
Fortunately, not literally…the flight was actually flawless, and glorious.
I had already re-formatted both of the SD cards, and that was transformational. The “Format SD Card” warning went away. The recording counter in the upper right-hand corner appeared, and worked perfectly.
I put my landing pad on the back deck, to see if that would solve the skittering problem on takeoff. It did, although I did just give an extra zap of power to lift, so I’m not sure what solved the problem. But it’s gone.
Up, up and away! This Beast
books compared to the Minis, even in Normal mode. I was at my target 300 ft ATL in no time, and zapped down the canyon.
Having done that same route with Minis, at that same altitude, I can now say definitely that Occusync 3.0
kicks butt on Occusync 2.0! I was much farther down the canyon before the RC signal dropped to 4 bars. It could have easily gone beyond my personal flight limit and remained in full control, but I didn’t do that test. I turned around and headed back up the canyon.
The ”Big H” on the screen is just great. I’ve flown enough in this canyon that I can always point toward home, but it’s a nice convenience. The aircraft warning system works great too. It’s triggered a couple of times over these four flights, and in every case, I got the signal before I could even hear the approaching aircraft, and I can hear them a long way away.
The obstacle clearance warning, which I’ve seen on some earlier flights, isn’t quite intuitive yet. I didn’t notice it today.
On previous flights, the ground proximity warning was an annoying distraction, but today it was useful. Frequently when I sleep on something, I understand it much better when I wake up, and that seems to have happened in this case.
The descent profile is very different for The Beast. With the Minis, if I’m up the canyon wall, I need to be careful to not move forward too fast coming home, because they can’t descend quickly enough to maintain the max 400 ft AGL elevation. Beast doesn’t seem to have that problem. He’ll drop like a stone on command, and remember, I’m still in
Normal mode.
On my previous approach and landing on the rear flight deck, I used the shadow of the drone to establish a “glidepath”. I followed that down in increments, hoping to land on the landing pad, but the prop wash blew the landing pad around! Still, with the shadow, and the elevation data, I knew I was in a safe place to land, so I did.
The “auto land” function seems to be a little slow on the uptake. With full stick down, it hovered at 1.1 ft for what seemed like a long time, before deciding to land. It didn’t seem as hard a landing as it had done previously…maybe that function is still waking up…but it’s nothing like the grace of the Mini-2 landing.
Mission accomplished! Flying from the drone’s point of view is now entirely natural. There were no system mysteries or malfunctions of any kind. The only thing that I didn’t like was that the flight was
painfully short!
I may have to bump that Fly More kit back up to the top of the wish list…
