Well, after a little over 5 hours of driving(round-trip), meeting the owner, talking and flying for 30 minutes-I returned home Yesterday a little after noon. I was about 10 minutes late-but the seller had found a small vacant park, right off the freeway-so we meet there and did the flight.
This F800 flies incredibly smooth, and is ridiculously easy to control. Wind? Ha-it just laughs at it. The retracts are cool-but kind of wobbly. I weighed the aircraft with battery and got 6.6 lbs, or right at 3000 grams, with battery(8000mah zippy-they're kinda heavy, and Go Pro).
So-charged up the batteries(only a max of 6.2amp-that's all this charger will put out), and went for 3 flights this morning. I had to use my goggles because my Black Pearl monitor won't be here until Tomorrow afternoon. I was using the Boscam TX832 receiver-which I already knew, did not give me any range on Airwave frequencies-this has the Immersion 600w VTX-set on channel 1, which is 5740(Ch 41 on the Boscam).
I could only get around 170M, and even then the video wasn't that great. However-the video from the Go Pro was great!! I used the black balls with ear plugs, and it was very smooth and stable-with no yaw wiggle, so no need for a 3rd axis on this aircraft.
Also-I need to re-adjust my way of thinking in regards to when to return home and land, at what voltage. Previously I had used 10.9 volts on the Phantom, as a good time for the aircraft to be front and center. Well-an 8000 mah battery still has a long way to go until it hits the first level warning at 10.7, when it's at 10.9.
I only flew each flight a little over 4 minutes-and the batteries still had around 40 or 50% remaining.
I'm hoping that by changing to a longer Spironet antenna on the aircraft(it had the really short one-Spironet CP), in combination with the Black Pearl receiver-to get much longer FPV range.
We'll see this weekend.
Here are some screen shots I took-from my 2nd video camera, of the take-off/landings. You can see-grass is rare here. But, I wanted my first flights to be out in the middle of nowhere, with nobody around. This thing is heavy....and has razor sharp blades-so I won't be going very close to anyone anytime soon.
Also-I use the Rubber Maid lid, as a helipad. The landing gear just fits-barely. And once, I landed towards the back-but my "flight training" kicked in, and I held power and slid it forward slowly, until the gear was in the center.
Also-since the retracts are so wobbly, I decided to carry it in the Rubber Maid tote. The gear is short enough that it doesn't touch the bottom-and it rests perfectly balanced on the arms.
Guys-flying a Phantom is way harder than flying this thing. With these long arms-it's just so smooth and stable.
Pictures;
