davef

Hey Merlin, thanks for the comments.

I guess at 2,000 feet altitude I’m pushing my eyesight. It’s more about guiding the aircraft around with gentle nudges and then waiting for the response. It did get pretty small, though given more ideal conditions I could probably manage smaller.

I may have a go up to 2,500 feet next assuming I get the right conditions, though the day that video was shot I was dodging storms. Before attempting anything higher though ill reprogram the failsafe to that the Picolario is shut down in the case of interference giving the JR RC receiver the best chance of hearing signals, also ill set up the brakes and descent just in case.

For what is essentially a piece of foam though, the Cularis is an excellent piece of kit, and it flies from a relatively small area (landing field about 500 feet long).

The point of that video was just to show those who don’t use a Variometer and are interested exactly what extra information the pilot gets. For the recording I left a spare receiver in my garage with a recorder running, so the Picolario 10 mw transmitter was penetrating 2 floors of my house and a pile of wood and brick.

That model uses 2,100mah batteries and are good for about 7 minutes of climb, so at 1,000 feet per minute I estimate that it’s possible (assuming I had control and eyesight to match) to power the model to 7,000 feet without thermals.

Cant wait to shoot more video from it.

I also started documenting the airborne camera project on the web. You can see what I have so far [link=http://loolee.org/aircam]here[/link].

Dave