The history of FPV - please share your stories/experiences

[Billy_boy_2010]

Wow what an incredibly talented pilot!

[BlueFlyer]

My very first experience of FPV was a far cry from what we think of today.

In fact, I "did FPV" without really knowing FPV was a thing and only years later when I started putting cameras on foamies did I realise I had done this all before

In early 2002 I was living in Lincoln, I had a cheap RC tamiya ford focus RS rally car and would just drive it up and down the street till the battery died. My neighbour had been having trouble with kids breaking into his garden shed so he'd bought one of those wireless CCTV cameras that you plugged a 9v battery into and a receiver unit you plug into the RCA port of your telly and he was recording his shed on a VCR overnight.

I thought it would be a good idea to put one of those cameras on my RC car, so I bought one off ebay for about £25 at the time and that's exactly what I did.

I cut a hole in the windscreen of the shell and glued in the wireless CCTV camera. The receiver plugged into my telly and I'd drive the car up and down the street again... albeit with about 15m range lol. But technically that was FPV, right?

Fast forward about 8 years and after complete failure trying to fly helis, I stumbled upon fixed wing models within a Heli flight sim and realised how easy they were to fly. I set about building my own scratch built planes and back then I had an awful "spy cam" with 512MB built in memory. I built a special pod for my spy cam and popped it onto my self built plane.

I eventually upgraded to a Bixler and a 808 720p HD cam but still had no idea that there was this whole FPV thing going on.... right up until I posted some footage on youtube of my local area "from above". I was inundated with PMs asking what VTX I was using, and what my ground station looked like... I had no idea what they were talking about.

I googled "FPV" and found lots of information about very fast american Ford cars (Ford Performance Vehicles) but then interspersed within the results were some posts from this very forum.

I joined up and the rest is history.