flash89

Greetings all,


I've recently made my first R/C airplane purchase, a Hobbico Electristar, and I am eagerly awaiting some nice weather to go out to the field and try it out.
The common Electristar battery configuration uses 2 3000 Mah NiMh packs and from what I've been reading that is about 9-12 minutes of flight time. These are probably the batteries I will go with. I don't plan on keeping this plane any longer than it takes for me to get enough skills to fly something a little more exciting, so I'm not going to invest in Lipos for this plane.

I've been into R/C cars for some time and already have a superbrain 977 charger that can handle the batteries for the Electricstar.

With my cars, I always just carry enough batteries with me for the day, but a single $50 4000Mah pack for my car lasts me 30+ minutes. Four of those packs at a total cost of ~$200 last me a good 2 hours, which is about as long as my wife let's me out of the house to go play with my toys. :-)

For about that same $50 I'm only getting 9-12 minutes of flight time with the Electristar. So for that same 2 hours of run for my plane, the battery cost would around $500 which seems kinda high.



Now, my question is this. Do most of you electric R/C pilots out there typically have enough batteries on hand to last the day, or do you charge in the field? If you charge in the field, what sort of setups do you use?
Is there typically Electric available at the field?
Do you charge from your Car battery?
Do you have larger batteries you charge your packs from?
Some sort of available alien technology I'm not familiar with?


Thanks for taking the time to read my question.