Another clear sunny day with temperatures reaching 18°C, the big difference to day was the wind, or lack thereof! We’ve been here almost a week and so far I haven’t felt comfortable with making the first flight of the quad-copter. Today was the day. What was even better was the fact that there was a continual exodus of rigs from the resort, so there was no one around to watch me.
Following a quick read, yet again, of the instruction book it was time to head outside. In some ways the fist flight was an anticlimax, the beast is so stable very little work was needed to keep it under control. I must admit that I had the beast operating in its most stable mode where the GPS and altimeter do their best to keep the machine where I want it to be. There are two other modes to try once I get more confident, one still has stability assistance and the other relinquishes total control to the pilot. That should make for more interesting flights.
After one success it was time to try and regain our satellite signal. In theory all I had to do was rotate the dish left or right as all the other settings were still tightly locked in. In practice, the theory worked! It took about two minutes to get the picture back.
The replacement GPS arrived today, so I spent some time playing around with it. This time it worked fine.
After lunch we decided to put the new GPS to the test, so we headed out to the local State Park to try some geo-caching. This was a total failure, out of 4 caches we went looking for all we found was:
The first cache seemed to have been covered in garbage, the second two had likely been removed as no one has found them since last summer and the fourth one we just couldn’t find, even though we knew it was there as someone found it yesterday. While we were at the park we took a walk around some of the trails, putting in about 1.5 miles.
Back at the RV resort it was still warm and sunny, so I decided it was time to clean the roof. I was not looking forward to this as the state of the front of the trailer suggested the roof would be a real mess. When I got up there I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was pretty clean. Even so it still took 90 minutes to clean it.