Coyote`s Skywalker

[Coyote]

No they are not showing any in stock.

The antenna on the mk2 was not bought, i made that myself so it was the length i wanted. Really easy to do, just a sma, coax and two 16.4cm elements on the end, epoxy them at 180 degress and your done :)

[Coyote]

Well out today and had issues again, autopilots fine but the audio levels on the tracker keep dropping too low for the EZTracker to work.

When i link up my bevrc vtx to plane and rx to trackr the audio level is much higher, its either the vtx or the new rx thats not playing ball :(

I need to compare audio levels against Pauls Immersion rx to see if its the same case, if it is it must be the vtx, if the audio levels have returned to high then it must be the new rx

I tried with different antennas ( ducks ) on both rx and vtx and get the same low levels so that rules them out too

[g.collins]

stupid question, have you check if the mike is being physical block or covered by something, or doesn't it work that way.
regards G

[Coyote]

Theres no mic on the immersion Gordon, it was working fine, im thinking its the new rx, but i can only find out next time Pauls down to be sure

[chrisallen649]

Nice plane mate. What ground station equipment are you useing? just curious as im useing 5.8 for video and i do get mixxed results sometimes. I was thinking of buying lawmate gear what are your opinions on them?

[Coyote]

Cheers, my ground stations going to be homemade, so far im on my own homemade 5.8ghz bi-qad antenna and skew planar. Im using a budget airwaves based receiver unitl ive finished my own diversity receiver unit. Immersion EZTracker.

Lawmate dont make 5.8ghz gear as far as im aware. Ive tried the bevrc (rf-sky) based units and found the immersion gear is miles better video quality wise.

[chrisallen649]

So you can still use the EZ antenna tracker without the EZosd? This is the main part what we are struggling with at the moment. I have seen those my fly dream antenna trackers but they only hold a weight of 1kg and by time you add x2 antennas it doesent seem that viable. I like the sound of this home made antenna, you will have to share some info when your in a generous mood :-) I should have been more specfic i ment 1.2ghz lawmate gear but again this is just a thought not to sure if the frequency is useable.

[Coyote]

No i have the ezosd on the plane ( used only for tracking ) or you can use tinytelemetry on the plane instead.

[Funky Diver]

I'd thought about using a tone generator where the speaker element is wired directly to the audio on on the VTx to provide a constant tone for audio input, rather than relying on the random rush of wind.



Would that address the whole sound issue do you think?

Thanks for the thread Ian, it's given me a good heads up on what to do when my SkyWalker arrives :D

[Coyote]

Hi Rich, why would you want to send a solid audio tone down a channel ?

Anyway, not many updates to go i think, im pretty happy now, it flies great, DOSD working fine with RTH etc

Keyfob camera worked fine, but in my view the keyfob takes up too much room, so now i know it works well and found the right angle to position it, i could cut it into the nose.

So keyfob in the nose, flight camera now moved further forward should make the experiance a lot better now :)

[Funky Diver]

Liking where you've put the cam... :)

autopilots fine but the audio levels on the tracker keep dropping too low for the EZTracker to work.

Or am I misguided? I've still to get to grips with some of this voodoo.

[Coyote]

Ah right, wrong track, the ezosd, if you want tracking connects to the right audio channel, it then sends a coded audio signal down the audio channel to the tracker. If you dont want to here anything, including tracking code just dont connect anything to the audio inputs of the vtx

[Funky Diver]

Gotcha :)

I did wonder, thanks for clarifying that :)

[Coyote]

Well a few more flights under its belt and time for improvement.

Its good, dont get me wrong, but a few things now need addressing.

Im going to be adding a wii nunchuck into the mix. This will in mode 1 control my camera`s pan and tilt. Then in mode 2 i can hold the nunchuck and fly the plane and pan and tilt without needing the tx.

To do this i need a tilt servo adding :



Job done, Hxt900 used, i like these servos for pan and tilt and as plane servo`s too. They are cheap and very effective, spare gear sets are readily available too.

My Tilt mechanism is none of this over complicated rigs, its simple, effective and ive used it many times before and it does exactly as it should with minimal weight added :



One of the other things is a tiny little twitching i get on the Pan servo. I first thought it was because on the ground it was in close proximity to my uhf tx. But as the antenna demo showed it was doing it in flight too.

This could be solved by one of three things :

1) Ferrite ring to squash rf
2) Moving servo stretcher away from Uhf rx
3) Swapping servo

Im thinking its more the servo stretcher than the servo brand myself so i moved the stretcher away fom the rx, next to the servo itself. I then added a ferrite ring too while i was at it.



The ferrite on both servos are tucked under the cockpit well out of the way too :





So hopefully, all my servo twitching will now be a thing of the past, the stretchers away from anything, ferrites on, should be good to go :)

I will be changing the base for the flight camera though when im able. The camera will sit forward of the servo so when i pan and tilt down it will hang over the cockpit so i can actually look down and apposed to looking at the cockpit foam :)

[Coyote]

Well that mod must have been the shortest one ive done.

On panning i found the servo was twitching, not due to the stretcher, but due to just too much strain on the servo. So out it came. Then i figured, if i was going to do it, i might as well do the other mod to bring the camera out a bit so i could look over the edge as well

On went a Futaba S2001 servo, which seems to like the servo stetcher more as well as being bigger. I just cut a bit of plastic as the mounting arm and that was that done :)



Much better fov around the plane now