The good ole days

[sawman]

How many of you remember doing aerial photography before about 2010? I recently came across some photos that I took back then (I won't post because they are embarrassingly poor by today's standards). I only had fixed wing platforms and the associated shortcomings of trying to get good shots in tight spaces. Used an analog video feed from a cheap Sony sensor mounted on or adjacent to the "real" camera. Lol! The only great thing was zero government involvement.
Isn't it amazing how much has changed!? The advent of drones. The fantastic cameras and software now available. Flight computers and planning software.
When the Phantom came out, boy howdy!! It was something. Anyhow, just reminiscing.......

 

[GFields]

Yes I remember very well. I didn't have/use a fixed wing but my first drone used the GoPro

 

[Droning on and on...]

That pre-dates me.

Did you have a VTX with a live view during flight?

 

[AeroJ]

Oh I remember those days... I can go back 12 years to find the first 'aerial video' (and I use the term exceptionally loosely) I ever made, in which I was given the flying bug by nothing so much as a toy grade helicopter, with levels of control and camera quality that I can only describe as 'exceptionally ropey', but it was enough to give me an ongoing appreciation for the view from above, and to show me the 'potential joy' of flying, once we have enough control to not spend the majority of our session time retrieving things from various levels of trees and shrubbery, and enough video quality to make the results worth looking at afterwards !

I have had my years of being entirely put off the hobby by depression at continuing over-regulation (of course I also remember when the ONLY rule was don't go over 400 ft !) and constant shrinking of available interesting places to fly, but the lure of flying remains strong even when I am not doing it, or more focused on other hobbies, so I always come back to it in the end.

But having flown everything from the worst toy-grade crap to home-built quads, and hexes, and latterly the better consumer models from DJI and Yuneec I am very much enjoying my latest return to the hobby with the M4P, which, I have to say, is pretty much everything I ever wanted from a drone, and the uncharacteristically sensible sub-250g rules mean that a lot more of the scenery I actually want to capture is newly available to me now, and in full, stable glorious colour with immense levels of control and safety features that I could only have dreamed of back in those early days.

Long may the adventure continue, what a time to be alive !

 

[sarahb]

Can't say that I can as the DJI Air 3 is my first drone.

 

[moldorf]

* my first job I got paid $1.05/hour and thought I was in hog heaven with big plans for my wealth

* my first car was a Rambler Classic station wagon I bought for 75 dollars, and gas was 24.9 a gallon. I had no luck in the back seat because convincing any girl to get into that rambling wreck was as easy as shoving buttermilk up a wounded bear's behind with a hot fork

* my first music system in that car was 8-track

* my first phone was a landline, rotary dial of course, with a 20 foot cord so I could move around my house. That was overkill because all I needed to get anywhere in my house was a 12 foot cord

* my first girlfriend was my first girlfriend for about 2 months which was actually a month longer than it took for my first wife to become my ex-wife

* my first year in college cost $1500. That included tuition, room & board in the dorms, and a 50 dollar credit at the campus bookstore

* my first computer had a 60MB hard drive and the OS was Windows 2.0

 

[teccer]

yes I remember it well, after giving up hangliding I still felt the need to experiance flying so I bought an easystar rc plane and fitted a sony cam onboard, this is one of my many videos I made.

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[Droning on and on...]

* my first year in college cost $1500. That included tuition, room & board in the dorms, and a 50 dollar credit at the campus bookstore

Reg fees at UC Davis in 1980 were $472 a quarter.

It's something like $10,000 now. No, there hasn't been 2000% inflation over the last 40 years.

Hmmmm...

 

[Prop Wash]

I remember the 30 cent gas, first car ('61 Ford Galaxy) was $50, Rotory phones, pay phones in booths, 8-track player in the car, 4-60 A/C (cranked all four windows down and drove 60).
But my drone days started in '20 when I got a cheaper "will I like this flying thing" drone. It was a Potensic fixed body with a camera I could only tilt up or down. I decided I did like this flying thing so I got my Mini 2 in '21. Much smaller, but WAY better!

 

[sawman]

That pre-dates me.

Did you have a VTX with a live view during flight?

Yes. Old Fox 800 (1280mhz) for the downlink to an analog splitter that fed a laptop for recording and a separate small 12v monitor. Crude but worked out to 3 miles before the static got too bad.
Early DragonLink OSD with GPS for flying a route. DragonLink UHF for control.

 

[sawman]

Oh I remember those days... I can go back 12 years to find the first 'aerial video' (and I use the term exceptionally loosely) I ever made, in which I was given the flying bug by nothing so much as a toy grade helicopter, with levels of control and camera quality that I can only describe as 'exceptionally ropey', but it was enough to give me an ongoing appreciation for the view from above, and to show me the 'potential joy' of flying, once we have enough control to not spend the majority of our session time retrieving things from various levels of trees and shrubbery, and enough video quality to make the results worth looking at afterwards !

I have had my years of being entirely put off the hobby by depression at continuing over-regulation (of course I also remember when the ONLY rule was don't go over 400 ft !) and constant shrinking of available interesting places to fly, but the lure of flying remains strong even when I am not doing it, or more focused on other hobbies, so I always come back to it in the end.

But having flown everything from the worst toy-grade crap to home-built quads, and hexes, and latterly the better consumer models from DJI and Yuneec I am very much enjoying my latest return to the hobby with the M4P, which, I have to say, is pretty much everything I ever wanted from a drone, and the uncharacteristically sensible sub-250g rules mean that a lot more of the scenery I actually want to capture is newly available to me now, and in full, stable glorious colour with immense levels of control and safety features that I could only have dreamed of back in those early days.

Long may the adventure continue, what a time to be alive !

I sorta chuckle when someone asks if a certain new drone is hard to fly. EVERYTHING is easy compared to back then! Lol

 

[sawman]

* my first job I got paid $1.05/hour and thought I was in hog heaven with big plans for my wealth

* my first car was a Rambler Classic station wagon I bought for 75 dollars, and gas was 24.9 a gallon. I had no luck in the back seat because convincing any girl to get into that rambling wreck was as easy as shoving buttermilk up a wounded bear's behind with a hot fork

* my first music system in that car was 8-track

* my first phone was a landline, rotary dial of course, with a 20 foot cord so I could move around my house. That was overkill because all I needed to get anywhere in my house was a 12 foot cord

* my first girlfriend was my first girlfriend for about 2 months which was actually a month longer than it took for my first wife to become my ex-wife

* my first year in college cost $1500. That included tuition, room & board in the dorms, and a 50 dollar credit at the campus bookstore

* my first computer had a 60MB hard drive and the OS was Windows 2.0

My first computer was a Tandy 2000 with both 5.25 and 3.5 floppy disk drives!! DOS and eventually Pascal.
First car was a wrecked Ford Fairmont station wagon. Got another rear axle from the junkyard and had something to drive through high-school and two years of trade school. So yeah....nothing happened in the back seat.

 

[Cafguy]

My first computer was a Tandy 2000 with both 5.25 and 3.5 floppy disk drives!! DOS and eventually Pascal.
First car was a wrecked Ford Fairmont station wagon. Got another rear axle from the junkyard and had something to drive through high-school and two years of trade school. So yeah....nothing happened in the back seat.

I got one of my first in-store credit cards to get a Tandy Computer! complete with those drives lol

 

[Droning on and on...]

My first computer was a Tandy 2000 with both 5.25 and 3.5 floppy disk drives!! DOS and eventually Pascal.
First car was a wrecked Ford Fairmont station wagon. Got another rear axle from the junkyard and had something to drive through high-school and two years of trade school. So yeah....nothing happened in the back seat.

I got one of my first in-store credit cards to get a Tandy Computer! complete with those drives lol

Oh man, trigger the Wayback Machine! First "PC" I ever messed with was the Tandy TRS 80. Would go to the local Radio Shack and spend all afternoon playing with the thing as a kid. They loved having me there, as I knew much more about it than the salesdroids, and indirectly sold a lot of TRS 80s.

Digging back some more, anyone remember the Commodore PET? Amazingly bad engineering, there were actually addresses you could poke (BASIC programming language for storing a value) that could damage hardware if you wrote the wrong value

First computer I had all my own was a Commodore 64. Actually a pretty good little machine. 6510 CPU, and a whopping 64K of RAM. The machine I learned to code assembly language on. Wrote my own symbolic assembler for it in machine code. A bonafide software bootstrapping project.

 

[Dustydoug]

I remember way back when aerial photography meant attaching a small camera with a timer to a rock and throwing the rock up in the air and hoping to get a somewhat decent picture while avoiding the falling rock. Ah the good old days.

 

[Prop Wash]

My first computer was a Tandy 2000 with both 5.25 and 3.5 floppy disk drives!! DOS and eventually Pascal.
First car was a wrecked Ford Fairmont station wagon. Got another rear axle from the junkyard and had something to drive through high-school and two years of trade school. So yeah....nothing happened in the back seat.

I got one of my first in-store credit cards to get a Tandy Computer! complete with those drives lol

Oh man, trigger the Wayback Machine! First "PC" I ever messed with was the Tandy TRS 80. Would go to the local Radio Shack and spend all afternoon playing with the thing as a kid. They loved having me there, as I knew much more about it than the salesdroids, and indirectly sold a lot of TRS 80s.

Digging back some more, anyone remember the Commodore PET? Amazingly bad engineering, there were actually addresses you could poke (BASIC programming language for storing a value) that could damage hardware if you wrote the wrong value

First computer I had all my own was a Commodore 64. Actually a pretty good little machine. 6510 CPU, and a whopping 64K of RAM. The machine I learned to code assembly language on. Wrote my own symbolic assembler for it in machine code. A bonafide software bootstrapping project.

All this brings back memories. First job I got after discharging from the Navy was @ a Radio Shack Computer Service Center. We'd fix the circuit boards, upgrade RAM from 4K to 16K (back then that was a BIG upgrade). We fixed disk drives (5 1/4 floppy). The first hard drive Radio Shack sold was 5MB and was the size of an old record player that could play 78s. Were those the good ol' days?

 

[John48]

My first was a Parrot with a controller that hung around your neck bulky and heavy

 

[Kilrah]

2006

 

[Droning on and on...]

I remember way back when aerial photography meant attaching a small camera with a timer to a rock and throwing the rock up in the air and hoping to get a somewhat decent picture while avoiding the falling rock. Ah the good old days.

Oh 1997...

 

[Rchawks]

You Betcha, I did the same thing loading a camera on a electric sailplane with insane drag and weight, but it worked well.. This is from 2006.