KP very high... who's going flying ?

[Droning on and on...]

If you're interested, look up "The Carrington Event" (1859), the single recorded instance of a major catastrophic disruption to comms equipment related to this phenomena.

Notably drones were dropping out of the sky during this event, but it's been covered up. Only small town newspapers have anything in their archives.

 

[AeroJ]

Notably drones were dropping out of the sky during this event, but it's been covered up. Only small town newspapers have anything in their archives.

Yes, I hear it wreaked havoc with the PCs of the time as well The Macs were fine though.

 

[Droning on and on...]

Yes, I hear it wreaked havoc with the PCs of the time as well The Macs were fine though.

My understanding is that Tesla EV horses stopped working as well.

 

[Felix le Chat]

Glad I went out tonight, despite it being a bit too late for extra nice footage (though the MP4 still did a stunning job in low light). Thinking of it as something of a reconnaissance mission for the proper flight in 4 hour's time I did learn some valuable things about the site, which should serve me well later.

1. I got the actual height of the mast, which is 195 ft, so RTH here should be set to 220 or higher to always clear the tower. This will give me some confidence to orbit around it, where it will unavoidably be between me and the craft for a short time. There are a lot of holes in it and I will have LOS through it - but I am hoping I won't lose signal.
2. There are <8 kestrels nesting on the actual mast itself, so we won't be getting too close to that !
3. 2 Microlights rocked up over the horizon at 100 ft AGL but were just passing through.
4. I could work out exactly where the sun is going to be at 7 am the next day, and can plan my flight paths and launch sites accordingly.
5. I was able to refamiliarize myself with how the whole hill looks from above, minimising my chances of becoming lost when I overfly the individual spars / marylins.
6. There are TONS of butterflies in the long grass all over the hill. It's like that bit in the Hobbit where they all take off from that tree ! So when we do ground level stuff we will follow the paths to avoid mashing them, but stay high enough to keep out of the way of any loose jumping dogs, of which there are likely to be several !

You may already have the app (or similar) on your phone: 'phototime' - a map based visual ephemeris which is really handy for remote scouting for best light during different times of the day.

 

[scro]

I flew my mini 3 pro in the thick of the May 24 geomagnetic storm, when the KP index was at 9. No positional issues were observed, and it was too dark for the VPS to be active, so relying purely on GPS. I got some amazing shots of the aurora!

I've done several flights when the KP has been 4-5 and not seen any GPS issues, sadly I also didn't see much of the aurora I was hoping to see.

 

[WanderLost]

Well, yesterday it seemed that today was going to be the most perfect flying day ever, so had 2 missions planned - 1 to the top of the biggest hill around (given the unusual lack of wind at great height today) or down to the South Coast. And UAV Forecast yesterday was green across the board. Today, however, it is not, and KP index has shot right up to over 5, which I very rarely see.

View attachment 176582

Would / should we go flying in that ? What do we think ?

I flew my M3E everyday last week in Northern Ontario without issue. Around 22-23 satellites after a couple of minutes.