Why not a postal contest?

[Tom Harper]

In the early days of modeling Postal Meets were common. Clubs all over the country were competing with each other and they never left home. They just published a set of rules and an entry form. The model's performance was witnessed and signed by a contest director or club president or whatever and mailed to the group sponsoring the event. With a board such as this it becomes easy and immediate.

The event could be on a designated day or the entries could come in over a specified period of time. If over time the flights might be a part of a local fun fly. The results can accumulate on a 'sticky'.

Keep it simple at first so us UAV beginners can participate.

Whatcha think?

[ElectroLawndart]

Better yet.

Get the GPS coodinates to the backyard of the Contest Director and the first UAV to land in it WINS! :p

Just imagine the sight of all these UAV's from all over the country converging on this poor guy's house. :eek:

Dart

The views of the author do not necessarily represent that of reality. :D

[clolson]

How about some sort of "treasure" hunt where we come up with a variety of "generic" sorts of things to photograph and the first person to get aerial photos from their UAV of all the items (or the person who can photograph the most items from the list wins ...)

The items need to be pretty generic so they don't favor one area of the country over another ... and perhaps wouldn't necessarily favor one type of airframe over another ... some of them should be easy, some of them should be hard ... some of them could have bonus points for the biggest or the most of whatever the item is ... just brain storming here, but things like:

- picture of self (or own house?)
- picture of sunset/rise
- picture of a cow
- picture of a long bridge (bonus points for the person with the longest/highest bridge?)
- picture of the nearest whole number lon/lat intersection (i.e. W94.0000 N45.0000) verified with maps.google.com reference image.
- picture of the nearest starbucks
- picture of a road intersection
- picture of a lake
- picture of a red car
- picture taken at night of anything on the ground that is illuminated with man made lights.
- picture (from the ground) of your UAV in flight.
- picture (taken from your UAV while it is in flight) of your UAV's shadow on the ground.
- picture of the cops chasing you off someone's private property.

No photoshop editing other than cropping or rotating?
There should be some time deadline that would make it a bit difficult to go get all the shots.

You all will probably have a lot more interesting ideas than me.

Curt.

[Tom Harper]

How about:

Contest extends over a reasonable period of time - 6 months minimum

Flight must be UAV from take off to landing

Task is to photograph a target on top of a mountain

Photos of attempt and target photo are posted here

Horizontal and vertical profiles of the flight are posted here

After the time period has elapsed board participants vote

Vote should be based on difficulty of profile vs complexity of equipment employed. An SS that photographs Mt. Davidson might win over a monster rig that does Mt. Shasta.


What say you board managers - want to try something like this?

[clolson]

I don't have a camera on my bird yet so I'm in no position to complain, but the highest point in minnesota is 2301' MSL which I suspect might be lower than the lowest point in NM. :-) It's called Eagle mountain and I found a picture on the web:

http://www.genesoc.com/hikes/highpoints/mn/EagleMountain24.JPG

Of course I could always drive over to Timms hill in WI which is their highest point ... all of 1951' :-)

Or the highest point in Iowa (1670') but that varies by a bit depending on where we are in the corn growing season.

How about a contest to capture the most different lakes in a single image (staying below the 400' agl limit.) :-)

My AP/UAV project is moving excruciatingly slow though due to lack of spare time this life so don't build a contest around me just yet. :-)

(I do hope to fly some wireless video cameras next week weather/schedule permitting.)

Curt.

[Tom Harper]

cl,

Hmmmm....in some places one might have to get creative.