Saturday, February 21, 2015

Flight Session #14 - Nova is flying great

Flew through 2 batteries at usual big field today. Nova quad is all tuned-in and flying great.

Light winds under 10mph, partly-cloudy skies, and KP-Index=3 today.

According to DroidPlanner, I was getting this (not bad for stock GPS-Module, just plainly mounted on PowerBoard).
10 sats, hdop 1.7 and
11 sats, hdop 1.4.
I tested Stabilize, Loiter, and Alt-Hold. Pretty cool to get it up to safe altitude, switch to Alt-Hold, and then fly around as fast as you can (full-stick). The green-path is around 30m high (90ft), and the pink is closer to 60m (180ft). Also tested Simple-Mode when quad got too high and far away to tell it's orientation once. It's strange but works fine.


I also practiced my manual landings (all were good). The quad's Auto-Landings were also perfect (using Land Mode and RTL). I don't think I had even one tip-over the whole session. THR_MID at 570 is almost perfect.

Not really noticeable during LoS flight, but after reviewing camera footage, I did notice a bit of struggling when the quad is doing a rapid descent straight down. However, research reveals this is to be expected when quads fly through it's own prop-wash. So, I don't think anything is "broken" and forum members suggested some piloting techniques to minimize the effect.

There were some recent forum reports of Mobius cameras causing GPS interference, so I tested for that today. I did one flight with camera off, and another battery with camera on. Nova flew great both times, with no differences in sats, hdop, control, or anything else. Not sure if it makes a difference, but I am using stock anti-vibration-mount which ends up with 2 metal plates between Mobius and Nova.

I was getting 11-12 minutes on each 2700mah battery. Could have gone longer, but I stopped with the LVA first sounded (one battery was only at 10.9v).

Anyway, a fun flying day at the field. I would even say my Nova quadcopter is flying better than ever before.

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