Just found the bird after a couple hours fence hopping and slogging through flooded fields. All her mods broke up and spread over about a 40 foot radius. I recovered everything BUT the darn trackimo that lead me there. It was pretty dense forested area and the trackimo broke off the birds velcro and probably nestled into some ground leaves out of sight. I was very disappointed because the trackimo has a "send beep" feature on the phone app, but it didn't work. My only guess is that there was standing water all around and maybe the beeper got wet and malfunctioned.
I monitor ventusky.com daily and you can get wind speeds at different altitudes in near real time. The holy grail the of long range wind gods visited my locale last night. I sent up a recon bird to validate and sure enough, I had 20+ mph tailwinds under 300 feet outbound, and 25+ mph return tailwinds inbound at 1000 feet.
I wasn't quite ready for a record run flight, but I could NOT miss this rare opportunity. So I hastily loaded up a factory platinum with all the mods and she was very heavy (just under 1500 grams), but with non stop tailwinds, this should have been a no-brainer flight, right??
All was going perfect until I hit the RTH button, then all heck broke loose and I couldn't control the bird any longer. She was so far out I lost radio contact when altitude dropped.
Anyway, it rained the entire night and the bird was literally dripping wet. I opened her up and will let a fan stay on her overnight tonight before I try to see if there is life left in her.
I am almost positive the bird side amp position caused the failure. I already know you can't place the amp on the topside, but It looked like it was far enough away. Well, it was at the margin and after looking at the GPS airdata telemetry, GPS was in and out of service the whole flight.
Lesson learned, if you do mod a bird side amp, it must not be on top period.
EDIT: or Lolo's theory that these over weight mod'ed birds create too much noise at the rear end. This makes sense too (or a combination of both in this instance).
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