I'm new to RC. I'm new to multirotor. But I have started BIG

I think there is method in my madness but I will let you guys decide.

I am not new to aerial photography but it was thirty years ago with Canon 35mm cameras and flying either in Cessna 152/172 aircraft or an Enstrom F28 heli. All I had to do was take snaps, the pilot did the driving. We were taking shots of houses for subsequent sale by knocking on the owners' doors. I had to map the shots - trace a line on the map with the start and end of each numbered 36 exposure roll, guide the pilot, change lenses, look ahead for next shot while taking the previous, rewind and ensure the roll was numbered and put in the correct slot in my film box. For 40 to 60 rolls of film per day.

Oh, and not to drop anything like a roll of film, a lens or me out of the heli as we were flying with no door ...

Still take photos and have embraced the digital revolution quite happily. Having seen the first attempts of a friend on our local forum to take pictures from his quad I became interested and started to look on the net at all kinds of craft.

Then I saw Colin Guinn's videos of thePhantom and was entranced - but - how expandable was the Phantom? At £800 plus for a GoPro and Phantom would I find the limitations turning to frustration a few months down the line?

So I started looking at ARF and RTF and components and self build until my head spun. There are so many choices out there and so many bad decisions to be easily made. I'm computer literate, happy to mess with command lines (hell, I was brought up on CP/M and DOs with a smattering of OS/400 for good measure). Programming a flight controller should be relatively simple - if I knew what I was supposed to be entering to make the craft fly properly!

The solution has come from the RC Groups classifieds. I have dived in and bought, for the price of a Phantom and camera, a DJI550 with Wookong, Spektrum DX8, gimballed GoPro between Jakub legs and an AV transmitter/receiver for FPV. The deal was collect only and the vendor lived 3 hours away. Cost in fuel was at least twice what it would have cost to send the kit economy only.

I cannot thank Pete Smith and his wife Lorraine for the kindness they showed in giving up their time to go through all the details of the kit I was buying. That alone was worth far more than the cost of the fuel. I got a comprehensive run through and a back garden demo of the craft and the accessories - spare frame, 3 spare batteries, numerous props, an ESC and a motor.

I had also gone to the post office that day before setting out to pick up a packeage from eBay that arrived several days early. A wee Hubsan X4 which I see as a "sacrificial" trainer before I risk the expensive kit.

So I have buzzed the furniture, crashed the Hubsan innumerable times and begun to teach myself control before taking the 550 to the air. Sitting typing this with a 5800mAh 4S and Hubsans miniscule LiPo both charging and looking forward to making more scratches in the furniture and in a couple of days trying my first tethered 550 flight.

So will it be "for sale - 550 with several damaged parts" or "look at my first video" appearing as the subject of the blog next?

Watch this space

This space has been watched! Over six hundred views - there must be some very bored people out there!

So - in the last couple of days this pilgrim has made a little progress. I am unusual for someone who plays with techie kit in that I do RTFM until things begin to make a little bit of sense.

Friday was the day I did a 300 mile round trip to collect the 550, Saturday I had to go out into the cold and do some work. I'm chair of a military vehicle club, some of our vehicles are stored in a compound on an old airfield which is now occupied by two regiments of Royal Artillery.

It's a handy place to be as we have skip diving rights - we get discarded kit, sell it to club members and hand the proceeds back to the regiments for donation to their charity of the month. Everyone a winner.

Cold day, wind blowing, in no way conducive to playing with a new toy. Besides I had work to do - clearing the debris of what had once been a caravan (trailer) and was now a flatbed trailer, a pile of aluminium (aluminum) and a loat of splintered wood. So we had a fire to burn up all the rubbish (trash).

When starting a fire using damp paper and an unknown accelerant ir would be best to use something glowing on the end of a long stick. Not bend down over the accelerant soaked paper and use a small butane lighter. The smell of burnt hair accompanied me all day.

Used the flatbed to nip around the camp and pick up two loads of pallets for a project we have. Only one other person of the five or so expected turned up so around 2 o'clock I was left on my own to damp down the fire and close up the compound.

Fire and aerosol cans. Do not try this at home.

The airfield is little used, there is a model aircraft cllub so I can get some help there. The military are cloudpunchers rather than drop shorts - they fire SAMS and not artillery. When they aren't putting supersonic projectiles into unsuspecting aircraft they fly drones - really rough looking model aircraft of 60 inch or so wingspan.

Apparently early morning flights in Afghanistan are fun, no-one around buut the dogs hear the whine of the electric motor and start barking. Johnny Taliban then rushes outside to shut Fido up and get back to sleep. Spotted! Airstrike called in ...

The landing of these is fun, originally a belly landing which in Afghan isn't always gentle, soft ground is at a premium. So some genius came up with a cunning plan - two squaddies (grunts), two poles and a net slung between them. It works really well!

I realise that some of you reading this don't have the fortune to be British so I have tried to put the appropriate translations in brackets for you Just to break the monotony here is a wee song about being British


So back home and play with the Hubsan until I got over ambitious and slammed into a hard piece of furniture. It landed right way up so I tried to get it in the air again but it just pivoted round and round its right rear leg. Closer inspection showed that it wasn't malingering, it really was wounded. Poor little thing had a broken prop. So onto eBay and order up a bagful of replacements.

This left me with little to do other than try to get the Wookong software running under Wine on a Linux machine. And then work out how to use it. I also spent the afternoon clearing some rubbish of my Windoze laptop so as to speed it up a bit and put the same Wookong configurator, .pdfs of all the manuals for the Wookong, the DX8 and the GoPro on the machine. It would have been a lot simpler to reinstall windows and start with a clean machine but it has a temperamental CD and I didn't want to be stuck with an unusable laptop.

And so to bed.

Sunday dawned cloudy and cold. I had to go and look at the fields where we will be holding our annual military show and walk around the 40 acre site with a few other guys checking on firmness of ground after the winter rains. We have to come up with a plan for using the ground if it is soft after weeks of prolonged rain - highly unlikely in the UK of course ...

The fields are private. We have access. Multirotor eating trees are a goodly distance from the centre. Another place to visit with few spectators whilst I'm learning. Back home. Play with setting Wookong from the PC and trying to fire up the 550. No way Jose. More RTFM.

And so to bed.

Today I have moved a lot of kit around so my upstairs office is now strictly cameras and aircraft with the laptop as the window to the world. Downstairs office is now back to graphics, vinyl cutting and printers. I have been reading the beginners area here on RCGroups. Kind of RTFF. Some really good information there and some nice people - this thread is long but well worth reading - from Dan_D

Eventually decided to give the Wookong software another try having read the full manual and grasped some of it. Motors fired up after a CSC. Hooray! (Yay!) Took the craft out of the office and put it on the floor in the living room. Fired it up and sat at just above idle then increased power and, with it still on the ground checked movement of the sticks. As it is flexibly mounted to the undercarriage/gimbal - for obvious reasons - I could see the movement of the stick reflected in the movement of the craft.

Next stop will be outside to try a tethered flight if its not freezing like today. Otherwise its wait for my Hubsan props and play inside again.

If you have read this far you are a hero!

Too cold to go outside. I'm a wimp!

Spare props came for the Hubsan today so I have been flying that into walls, ceilings, floors and furniture with the occasional successful hover and controlled manoeuvre.

I took off the Graupners that came with the 550 and reinstalled the DJI props on the basis that a) I got a whole bunch of them with the 'copter and b) they are cheaper than the Graupners to chew trees and concrete with when I do get brave.

This may be wrong and I would like some advice: I have replaced the DJI prop nuts with nyloc nuts so that I don't lose a prop due to nuts loosening in flight. Is that sensible or have I set myself up for some other calamity?

Quick post as it is late and my back for some reason is killing me. But I want to share this, first time I have seen it - formation nanocopters!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=YQIMGV5vtd4

It was a cold, grey but calm day yesterday. I had other things to do. Last night I planned for my first flight to day.

I wrote out a checklist of what to do as a preflight, what all the switches on the Spektrum were for and how they should be set. the colour and flashing codes of the Wookong LED ...

I gathered together those tools I felt necessary for a test flight and prepared a flight box to put them in, checked the laptop was charged and all manuals and software loaded. Charged batteries.

Woke up this morning with the sound of wind in the trees outside. I live a couple of hundred yards from the sea (English Channel) and half a mile offshore is a weather station connected to the internet - http://www.chimet.co.uk/(S(0lyzqejl5...)/Default.aspx

It has a sister site - camber met located just offshore of my chosen flying field. I have been monitoring both all day and the winds, not apparent in sheltered spots on my island, have been Force 5 or above. It's become a bright clear day.

I am wanting to get out there and play but I am certain that disaster would soon follow. I am consoling myself with the thought that I should be an old pilot and not a bold pilot.

The devil sitting on my shoulder is calling me a wuss and telling me to go out and play in a sheltered area - nothing can happen!

I have been intermittently flying the Hubsan indoors to keep my hand in. Remarkably resilient though it is scars are beginning to show. The biggest space I have is nominally 15 feet by 11 but in that area is one wall of bookshelves, a staircase to the floor above, a three piece suite and various boxes of stuff with nowhere else to go. The Hubsan has suffered a broken arm, lost, snapped and split props and the indignity of being made to attempt to fly when one prop is definitely damaged and ending up moving in circles around its wounded arm.

Only the time taken to recharge the battery between each flight has saved it further indignities.

So here I am, ready to rock and the weather is against me. Brings back memories of sitting on airfields waiting to fly photo missions and ending up doing little all day apart from reading the latest NOTAMs and going through accident reports.

Watch this space!

Just a quickie - my mate called saying he had a load of chairs to stash in one of our containers on the airfield so I said I'd meet him over there. Took the Hubsan with me just in case.

Our compound is an old aircraft dispersal point, now surrounded by 40 years of trees and undergrowth. The concrete pan is 80 feet in diameter. the surrounding trees make it a sheltered area. Fire up the Hubsan. Nothing in the way except 5 cars, 2 armoured vehicles, a tractor, 8 trailers, 2 twenty foot containers, 2 4x4s, two trucks, a concrete garage and a 155mm howitzer.

Great fun zooming around, panic grounding before hitting a lump of armour plate or concrete and then working out how to fly out from underneath a vehicle. Got excited and twenty feet in the air. Mistake, suddenly the full force of the wind was evident and it headed for outside the compound and the bushes at speed. By luck managed to land it on top of one of the containers close to the fence. Couldn't see it, no idea which way it was facing and not yet possessing enough control to be able to operate sticks unless flying with rear of machine pointing directly at me.

Note to younger readers - eight years without alcohol, tobacco or drugs doesn't restore your reflexes that have been trashed by thirty previous years of abuse! I need to fly something that moves slower than a Hubsan, with attitude control, in still air with nothing by soft grass surrounding it. Just hope the weather will be kind to me this week and I get a day to do this in.

Tuesday 5th March - First flight - snuck into our compound and put the rig on the ply bed of an old caravan chassis we use as a flatbed trailer. Checked flashing lights, got GPS fix and put the throttle up with the Wookong in attitude mode.

Easier to control than the Hubsan but the disadvantage of a compound is the amount of kit we have stashed there - see previous post. Not the wisest of places for an absolute n00b to fly. Concrete is an unforgiving surface for hard landings too.

Surprisingly tough craft. It survived head on contact with a steel container that would have left me unconscious or worse. The GoPro came off the gimbal and scattered battery, back and card around the area, broke a prop and three of the six tywraps (cable ties, zip ties) holding on the ESCs broke.

I now feel far more at one with the kit having tsken it home, checked cables, tightened fastenings, looked over every inch and repaired the poor wee beast.

Today, Saturday 9th March: Over to the compound with the 550 and kit in the back of the car. Spend the day with others from the military vehicle club getting two quads - bikes not copters - to run properly and also installing shelving in one of our 20 foot containers to hold the kit we use for our annual 3 day show.

A good day's work from the team with much achieved. One of them, Colin, who works as an archaeologist saw the 550 in the back of my car - it's an estate (station wagon) - and wasn't convinced by my explanation of it being a lawnmower. So I gave him a quick precis of what it does and he could immediately see a use for it on some of the sites he administers. UK does not allow flights for commercial gain with the relevant licences from the Civil Aviation Authority.

He just thought it might be relaxing for a couple of flyers to fly their multicopters over the fields in which he is digging at the end of a summer's day when the sun is nearing the horizon and the shadows are getting long. I am quite happy to give a talk about UAV and FPV to his team at some point afterward as a thank you for letting us fly in their field. He is quite willing to offer a token payment - for the lecture

Anyway that is well into the future.

Around 16:20 we had finished our tasks in the compound and Colin and I decided to fly. Also decided that discretion was the better part of Valerie so the compound, with its multitude of sharp, solid things was not the best place to try for an observed second solo. So we went for a drive past the TA building and one and a quarter miles down to the other end of the main runway.

There was a man packing away "Model Flying" signs into the boot (trunk) of his car (automobile). So we chatted and it appears that multicopters aren't totally verboten at his club. Didn't mention FPV just to be on the safe side. He showed us a patch of grass that was a good place to fly, I explained that I had set height and distance limits in the Wookong software and he was happy as long as we kept away from the horses across the road.

Came out of the house today leaving a fully charged battery behind. Had used the other for setting up Spektrum and Wookong. I did have two 4S 5000mAh but didn't have any velcro to secure to the velcro pad on the battery tray and they were a different weight so could only attach the one half used 3S.

So the flight was anticlimactic. Set the GoPro running, waited for GPS lights to show, took off, hovered, went up further, rotated, moved forwards and sideways and back. The failsafe kicked in after a while and brought the machine back at 20metres height then descended to a gentle landing close to its lauch point.

BUT - could you watch the video (yawn) and tell me what is occuriing during the descent? The whole craft seems to "shiver" and the motors run oddly for a second then it regains normally controlled descent. Is this standard or should I be worrying?

If you have been - thank you for reading!

Quick flight test of new hexacopter (3 min 7 sec)