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Todays FPV Adventure!

Discussion in 'AP/FPV' started by Tiger, Oct 7, 2014.

  1. Tiger

    Tiger Registered

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    I've bought a lot of things in my life that I thought were going to be really small, but for the most part, they were at least a little bigger than I had hoped. Such was not the case when I opened my box from Horizon Hobby today. Inside was the camera/transmitter off of their new FPV Vapor and it was even smaller than I had hoped. You can see the pictures below to see what I mean. This thing is REALLY tiny and contains both the camera and a low power (10mw) transmitter along with a tiny clover leaf antenna. I was impressed!

    The first thing I did was to do a little range test here in the yard by laying it on top of my Honda and walking down the driveway. This wasn't a totally realistic test because there were a lot of trees between me and the transmitter and 5.8GHz really doesn't penetrate much of anything. I got out to about 400ft before things got a little flaky. I could still have flown at that point, but there were dropouts when I moved past the trees. If I had had a patch antenna on the receiver, I know I could have gone a lot further.

    Having gotten a little confidence from the ground test, I decided to install it on the top of my UMX (mini) Radian glider. I love this plane and I really hoped this would be useable on it. The transmitter comes with a power splitter cable so you can share the main flight battery, but I decided to just velcro a second battery on top of the wing. That turned out to be a good thing, because the extra weight I was adding really cut into the flight time of the plane. Anyway, I took the setup over to a local farm for the acid test. Oh how I wished I had my dvr with me, because the flight went really well. The Radian had no trouble lifting the extra weight, but it did fly a lot faster and the flight time was shortened significantly. Still, the flight time was plenty long enough for the stress level it provided. :) Most of my air time was with someone else on the goggles, because I wanted to do some range testing and get a feel for how it was going to fly. Flew out a couple batteries that way before I tried the goggles myself. The range turned out to be very good considering. It was a LOT further than the 150-300ft they talk about. I think if you had the patch antenna, you could almost fly it out of sight. The only real issue is the 5.8GHz dropping out if you go behind something like a tree or building. Some of that would go away with more antenna gain, but it's always going to be a problem at this frequency. Wish they made something like this at 900MHz.

    It was getting by the time I got the goggles, but I saw enough to know that in normal daylight this is going to be a lot of fun. I'll try to rig up my dvr before I go out again. It's pretty cool looking down the nose of the little glider while it's flying all over the place. :) Here are some pics of my setup:

    ...Tiger

    UMX_FPV-0sm.jpg UMX_FPV-1.JPG UMX_FPV-2.JPG UMX_FPV-3.JPG UMX_FPV-3.JPG

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    Last edited: Oct 7, 2014
  2. GPS

    GPS Registered

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    Holy cow is that camera small! Is this the one you and Chris were talking about at Redwood? Very impressive, both the size and range.
    If you make any video please post it.

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