Well, after weeks of building and testing different FPV systems, I finally flew the "Hippo Drone" - named after RCG user "Hippo" since the design draws partly on his orignal plane "The Frog" . The front end draws some of it's characteristics from RCG user name "Lmopar69".... and his plane the N2. The plane is a super stable flyer. It uses a Hobbyzone SuperCub Wing that I cut ailerons into and re-inforced. The motor is a Hoffman Magnetics "The Rocket" throwing an 8 x 3.8 SF APC prop for tons of thrust and an E-Flite 20A ESC on a 1350 3S pack. The camera and transmitter for video .... Camera is a Sony KX 131 NTSC color miniature CCD and the video is fed to the goggles via a Foxtech 2.4 GHZ transmitter and receiver. The camera is capable of 720P so the picture should be pretty good. It looks good taxiing around on the ground but the air will be a different story. Going to fly it Monday morning and find out... weather permitting. The receiver has an extra "video out" port, so if I can figure a way to hook up something to capture the video off the receiver that would be really cool because I should have over 1/4 mile range with clear reception. The plane on the other hand is having to run on 72 Mhz FM due to the horrible effect that the video has on 2.4ghz range. But I have a synthesized Corona 6ch RX and a JR Quattro radio that both seem to be very good. We'll see.

Rock on

Bo

Wow, it looks just like me...

Can't wait to see aerial videos.

As soon as I figure out how to record to a device from a single "A/V OUT" jack onto something with decent recording quality, I will have flight video's galore.
First flight went well. The goggles were reversing the way I turned so after landing sans goggles, I re-focused, re-calibrated and re-set most of the camera settings as this was the first time for it to be outside. Now I see right is right and left is left. Goggles not as capable of excellent quality as the camera is capable of, but a recording of the video out will be the deciding factor to that. If nothing else, another device to record in HD separate from the FPV system can be added and I'll use the FPV to make sure what's recording is cool. Thanks for the kind comments..... you're the man Hippo..

Bo

I'm really looking forward to seeing this in person. I wanted to do FPV last summer, but it wasn't in the budget. I'm really shopping around for a setup to take to SEFF. Trying to decide between high power 900mhz or cheaper 5.8ghz transmitters.

I have an old setup with a 100mw 2.4ghz transmitter, but I only take that out when I want to make people blame their spektrum radios for crashing... (That's right, all the Spektrum lockouts are secretly my fault... Mooohahah) Actually, it's broken. I lent the setup to a friend, and he returned it saying, "it never worked". By which I assume he meant, "I can't tell positive from negative, and by the time I figured that out, it never worked."

Now my major problem: I had just about decided on the predator FPV ready set from HK, but then I found out it has head tracking built in! That would be great, but apparently my JR 9503 wont' work with that head tracker (If only you could assign it to channel 2-4.) I don't want to buy it and then waste all that head. So, I'll have to sort out all my kinks before I order anything.

Dan