Learning To Fly - A Quadcopter

I've edited together some bits from my first few flights with my new Hubsan H501S quadcopter.

Having used a couple of DJI drones, it does feel more like a toy than they do, but at little more than 200 pounds it is good fun and adding extras like batteries or antennas is cheap and rewarding. You do have to get some of the stuff direct from China, but Banggood.com and other similar sites are safe, reliable and delivery is pretty good.

I've upgraded the antennas on the controller and have a good range of more than 100m now. I've also bought a cheap FPV headset, but not really had much chance to try it for more than a couple of minutes. it also needs a better antenna, to keep up with the range of the antennas on the quad.

I guess I need much more practice and to get out and about with it a bit more. I want to do some videos of my brother working, and intend to use my action cameras as well to capture the full experience. I might just decide to get a DJI Spark and have a stabilized camera.

Rambling about Rambling

For the first time in many years, I took a walk up to the summit of North Barrule HERE with Russell. We cheated a bit by walking up from the Guthrie Memorial, but we then walked down all the way back to the sea.

Here's the view from the summit looking north. We had hoped to be able to fly the drone from here, but it was a bit too windy to risk it. it was also, as you can see, very hazy and the cloud kept forming and clearing around us as we took a good look around.

The walk up wasn't too bad, but if anything, the return trip down the eastern shoulder of the hill was more demanding. I'm glad we didn't try and go up that way, as it is very steep and any accessible starting point is much lower down.

Here's another photo taken on the way down, looking towards Ramsey and the north. Russell liked the juxtaposition of the rocks in the foreground and the view into the distance. I've even tried running a Neutralhazer filter on this one in Photoshop, but even that can't pierce this much cloud.

We are hoping to go up again and it'd be great to get the drone out from that high up, to give a different perspective on the area.

Video Slideshows

I've been working on a couple of slide-show videos, both taken from My Namibia-Botswana trip. The first shows some of the wildlife we saw during the trip and the second is a look at some of the panoramic landscapes that I photographed as we went along.

They've given me some insights into quite a few new things, 

Making slide-shows is quite time consuming and not something I'm going to do that often, maybe only one or two for each trip like these.

I now know how to do a few more things in Adobe Premiere, particularly the stuff that can be done with animation and movement.

I've found a couple of great sources of freely use-able music to give a little background to videos like these and they seem to be making quite nice stuff available.

Bridging The Gap

I've just added a page describing the trials and tribulations of installing a half-mile wifi bridge to enable some networked CCTV cameras. It all turned into a bit of a marathon, but we've got it sorted in the end. The page is here - http://darkmann-iom.blogspot.com/p/bridging-gap.html

Sometimes things don't go according to your original plans and you have to move to Plan B or make up a new plan and start all over again. Does anyone want to buy a couple of as new wifi dish antennas?