Ben B

Posted by Denis Watkins on 17/07/2020 16:41:49: Agree, this is an overall brilliant post Steve, will all the relevant information. But, some airfoils do increase altitude turning into wind, especially flat bottomed wings Perhaps we can say "some planes with flat bottomed airfoil wings show a tendency to balloon when being turned into wind due to the discrepency between ground speed and wind speed". Flat bottomed wing planes certainly balloon but it's not the plane or aerofoil doing it... It would be interesting to see a black box of stick commands and compare with an overlay. I used to increase throttle on the turn (to maintain groundspeed) and feed in down elevator to prevent climbing then release the elevator stick when turn completed and be surprised when it "ballooned". Your brain tells you it's the plane. It's not. Perhaps we should start another thread of modeller myths 1. "Radio interference" (a.k.a. dumb thumbs) 2. Trees that jump out and grab planes 3. Ballooning 4. Bernoulli's principle (now that one is debatable!!!)

I suspect flat bottomed wings "balloon" more because they have worse penetration, fly slower and therefore beginners compensate more using elevator to keep position relative to themselves. Or use more power which makes the problem ever worse as it causes climbing. Apart from gusts the plane doesn't know it's in wind. Imagine if you were in a constant wind situation and you were standing in a flying hot air balloon flying circuits around the balloon. Suddenly the ballooning would stop- why? Aerofoils know two things - AoA and speed of flight. That's it. It's flying in a body of air, the speed of that body of air over the ground is irrelevant until it comes to landing or if the pilot is on the ground and confusing airspeed and groundspeed.

I suspect flat bottomed wings "balloon" more because they have worse penetration, fly slower and therefore beginners compensate more using elevator to keep position relative to themselves. Or use more power which makes the problem ever worse as it causes climbing. Apart from gusts the plane doesn't know it's in wind. Imagine if you were in a constant wind situation and you were standing in a flying hot air balloon flying circuits around the balloon. Suddenly the ballooning would stop- why? Aerofoils know two things - AoA and speed of flight. That's it. It's flying in a body of air, the speed of that body of air over the ground is irrelevant until it comes to landing or if the pilot is on the ground and confusing airspeed and groundspeed.

Just briefly re ballooning- it's pilot induced. On the downwind turn people hold in more elevator to prevent drifting downwind and trying to keep a constant radius on the ground (ignoring that the plane is flying through the air). When this extra elevator isn't bleed off quickly enough the plane "balloons" and people blame the plane / weather / spektrum transmitter etc etc.   In I.T. this is called PEBCAK   "Problem exists between chair and keyboard" Edited By Ben B on 17/07/2020 09:05:46

Can you measure the total pack voltage when off the charger (would require a multimeter). Or possibly check the individual cell voltages through the balance lead.

Plugged in the balance lead?

Did you pay by paypal????

If one of the cells is bad and being reversed charged by the other ones it could result in that sudden drop potentially. Just a thought.

I always assume I'll have to solder on new connectors so when I don't its a bonus! Even if one of the connectors is right there will always be one that isn't so when the soldering iron and heatshrink gun is out....

I think the issue is something called Eye Relief. I've now got three sets of goggles. In my experience box goggles offer good eye relief whereas my Orcas don't though it could be partially impacted by my prescription inserts. Still perfectly flyable though.

Posted by Peter Christy on 06/04/2020 09:26:03: Its a shame no-one makes an electric starter for small engines (based on a 540 or smaller motor, perhaps?), as this would solve many of the problems. Don't think I'm anti-diesel - I'm not - at least not in model aeroplanes! (Cars are another matter!) I've got quite a few diesels, AM15s, a KingCat, and several PAW 149s. In contrast to the 80, the PAW 149s are little jewels of engines! Easy to start (as long as you don't use D-1000!), quiet and they throttle extremely well. -- Pete This is exactly what I made 25-odd years ago to start my Black Widow after starting it sent me to A+E for some stitches. We had a lathe at school so I just turned up an adapter from ali to attach to a can motor and used some silicon hose as the cup. Worked well. It was the first thing I made on a lathe so took absolutely ages.

If the worst comes to the worst I shall walk to Waitrose, buy a few beers and sully my backside with the free copy of the Daily Mail. Normally I wouldn't consider anything of the sort but desperate times call for desperate measures. I woudln't normally be knowingly in the same room as DM....

It's as stupid as it is unnecessary. A simple stratification of altitude would be much better. I don't want Amazon buzzing over my roof at 50 foot just because they've persuaded the powers that be to hand over the skies. Anyway Amazon etc will be delivering on quads which do vertical delivery. So just say up to 400 foot belongs to the landowner and above that ID system its required. If you want Amazon, McDonalds or whoever to deliver you authorise them to land in your airspace after giving online authorisation . The US solution is just lazy and covers up immature tech.

Don't bother. Even if it was an expensive battery I wouldn't bother. I've tried resurrecting discharged lipos and it doesn't work- sometimes some of the cells will wake up but the chance of all is slim and those that do will have IR issues. So even an expensive battery I wouldn't bother. On a 3s 2200? No chance. Even if it appears to work when it burns down a plane / garage / house it's kind of an expensive way of saving money.

The really crazy thing is when it comes to Influenza (which is circulating in the UK, is killing people and for which there is a vaccine) we really struggle to get people to have the vaccine. It's all about perception......

Out of about 200 BG orders the only one that ever didn't make it was the first! My first FPV goggles! It was very annoying waiting and being told to wait even more but they duly resent it without argument and every single order since then has arrived without issue. I might have been lucky though with the CS person I got. The only thing I find is that sometimes items are cheaper from international sellers through Ebay so BG isn't always a bargain. But I still order from it 2 to 3 times a week. Even if at the moment I'm avoiding doing so. BG CS can be rubbish though. I ordered 2 CCW motors and 2 CW motors for a quad. they sent me 3* CCW and 1* CW. I contacted CS and they said I had to supply a video of my opening the containers. I suggested that most people don't routinely video "unboxings" just in case they've been sent the wrong thing. They then said they'd act if I could send them a picture of the incorrect items with the envelope they came in (which by then I had thrown away). I suggested I could send them a photo of the incorrect items next to some photo ID (to confirm it wasn't just some photo off the net of mismatched motors) but they said they had to have a photo of the packaging so they could trace the package. While this was going on I got fed up waiting and ordered 2 more CW motors. And they duly sent me 2 more CCW motors! That one I just sorted through Paypal as I couldn't be bothered to go through BG CS who seem mostly hell bent on obstructing. The CW and CCW motors had different colour nuts so it looked off having different colour nut on one of them. In the end I just CCW motors on the quad given that I had so many of them by then.

There's an interesting (if inconclusive) article on the likely source of the infection here: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/mining-coronavirus-genomes-clues-outbreak-s-origins

Agree- perhaps a bit early to panic. I work in a GP practice and lots of flapping about the risks but reality is that the number of confirmed cases may well be a significant under-estimate. We obviously can count deaths at this point but true number of cases is more dificult. So the death rate might well be significantly less than reported. One of these days there will be cause for panic but not sure quite there yet. After all so far we've had Swine flu, Bird Flu, SARS. MERS ("Camel Flu", Zika... And yet I'm still hear letting patients sneeze all over me. The only one that got my truly twitchy was Ebola but that one tends to resolve due to the high mortality rate. We shoudn't be complacent and I probably won't be ordering quite so many goods from Banggood etc but it's difficult not to. Half the time when I buy stuff off Ebay despite saying it's UK based it's flipping drop-shipped!

Sounds like a job for a mobius mini! You might need to think about a little airflow depending on whether you are recording hd and what construction the plane is. IE if you rammed it into the nose of a foamy and set it to record hd it could overheat. It's a little camera doing a fair bit of work.

There was also a scam going round recently whereby people from "the NHS" would ring elderly (IE perhaps vulnerable) patient saying there was now an administrative charge of £2 for flu vaccination and as they had had the vaccine a charge was payable and they needed to take a credit card number for this "small admin fee". Not surprisingly if anyone gave their CC number it was £2 that got taken. Another quite cunning scam impacting on the NHS was scammers would order a load of ipads using the contact details of the manager of a GP practice (invoiced so payment later). The scammers would have tracking details so would be able to monitor when the delivery had occurred- they would then turn up at the bemused practice (wondering were these ipads had come from) pretending to be from the local NHS IT department saying it was all a mistake, they were for a different practice and they would take the unwanted ipads away.... Thankfully most practices have pretty good CCTV so quickly the ID of the culprits were caught and the last time they tried this a switched-on practice manager rung the police and who nicked the person.

At work our manager got an email from "Ikea" saying he had a refund due. He forwarded it to me saying it was an obvious scam (we hadn't bought anything from Ikea for about three months). The phone number to ring looked similar to Ikea customer services. I just rang the main number (instead of the one on the email). The person on the phone said they couldn't confirm much as I wasn't the account holder but that a refund was due (based on the refund number in the email). Our manager then rang and after half an hour it transpired they hadn't actioned a 3-for-2 on some bags of Dyme bars he had bought there and they owed him £3! It only took a total of about £200 of our time to get this refund!!!!

I thought it was good stuff. Not in depth and hoping for bob#2 but can't complain about a bit of publicity for the hobby / sport.

ps if you do go for those they do break if sat on / crushed but a bit of cyano and kicker works wonders, I've repaired my daughters glider a few times (people tend to take enthusiastic run-ups, fall over then lawn-dart the thing into the carpet).

I bought my daughter and her friends one of these each **LINK** Thankfully I didn't install the wing as shown in the photos :D lol! They actually fly really nicely. Might just arrive in time if expedited shipping. I suspect also like most things on Banggood they are available from UK sellers, just try to make sure they actually have them in stock and aren't just sending you the drop shipped one from Banggood and creaming off the profit....

I'm really confused! Do we know if the upcoming CAP 1789 and EASA drone rules will impact on the requirements of registration? Some of the questions in the BMFA test and the CAA website rules seem to contradict 1789. e.g. EASA suggests < 250g legacy models can be flown pretty much anywhere, just not over crowds as part of the A1 criteria. e.g. https://register-drones.caa.co.uk/drone-code says for <250g you don't have to register but you still have to follow the rules which means you can't fly closer than 50m to people (30m) for landing. Such a drone, however, would be A1 which means you can fly over people but not crowds. So which one is it? >50m until EASA comes in and then A1? It would help if the CAA produced an app were you could plug in the details e.g. whether you're registered, weight of model, FPV or not, location etc and it says whether you can fly or not! I've read as much of the specifications as I can and I'm completely lost. Not overly tempted to ignore it and just go fly and cross my fingers but really this is drowning the sport in bureaucracy. Why didn't they just have a "flying a drone without due care and attention" or "dangerous drone flying" law and be done with it- allow judges to decide what is / isn't allowed! Or have a non-specific "health and safety" set of regs which mean you have to assess whether it's okay to fly. Some of the specs seem very specific and yet at the same time vague (e.g. what is a "recreational area" or a "congested area".