Flying from inside the house

Joined
Dec 31, 2013
Messages
21
Reaction score
0
Hey guys, noob here. I've been in reading mode over the past week or so trying to come up to speed on information on the forums, so apologies if this has been addressed.

What I would like to achieve:
Sit in my office and fly my P2V in FPV. My home backs up to a large park so my typical flying will be from home anyway.

So far my plan is:
Mount TL-ANT2414A on top of my chimney, mount it on some servos and use an old RC car controller to point the antenna. Decision point would be to use a long cable from the existing range extender to the TP-Link or to mount them both and use the weak WIFI signal for the bridge.

Still trying to figure out the same solution for the tx controller which quite frankly I haven't had the time to research yet.

Am I missing something or is this something that should be achievable?

I appreciate the help!
 
If you externally mount an antenna it has to be able to point both up and down in addition to moving in a 360 degree circle. For your transmitter antenna you would need to change the mount so you can use any antenna. This mod shouldn't be done unless you're confident you wont mess up your controller. Once you do that you can screw in a 5.8ghz signal amplifier and have that go to an externally mounted antenna. If you don't want to worry about direction you could also go with using high gain omni directional antenna's for both.

Either way you go it's probably not a good idea flying your plane around without having an actual visual line of site of what you're doing. You can't rely on just the FPV screen especially if you're not a highly experienced pilot flying by FPV alone.
 
Depending on how advanced the autonomous waypoint features going to be then the upcoming ground station features firmware update might be interesting to you.

As has been said, don't underestimate the difficulty of flying purely by reference to a screen and the complete lack of spatial awareness it gives you. I would hate for you to stuff it full tilt into a tree, or worse a person, that you didn't see because you didn't have the peripheral vision. I really wouldn't fly in a public space using just a remote screen without having a spotter with line-of sight, and even then it's going to be classed as reckless if it all goes wrong.

If you aren't there actively monitoring what your aircraft is doing you are leaving yourself right open to a charge of reckless endangerment and/or getting your backside sued off. If your home backed onto your own farmland, say, that's one thing but a public park is a whole different kettle of fish...
 
I guess that the police, government agency, and military
remote controlled drones have the same problem?
 
I don't know about you, but I get bored pretty quickly when flying over the same area after awhile.
Probably because I treat my PV as a sky camera, so imagine going over the same area again and again shooting same ole thing.

Another thing to consider is that the PV will need about a 30-60 seconds under the sky to acquire enough satellite locks to register its home point.

Yet another thing to consider is in case of wifi/fpv disconnection and/or flyaway occurence, you won't be able to see the phantom and you lose the ability to reposition the tx to attempt to regain control/connection.
 
Thank you for the feedback - I agree with the spotting issue, that is easily resolved as my wife wouldn't mind spotting for me as needed.

To the comment on getting bored, I'm with you on that. My setup will have to be changeable, meaning quick connects to the external antenna's and the ability to bring it elsewhere as needed. If this requires some duplicate equipment I'd be fine with that.

I'm pretty confident in my FPV flying especially with the GPS assist, at least for now. I only fly at an altitude that clears all area buildings, powerlines, trees, etc. In fact the minimum RTH altitude will still clear these items at 66ft(20M). The park behind my home is largely undeveloped land that is owned by the city for public use. That said, I do not fly over the playgrounds and other areas that have people around.

Anyway, maybe some video goggles would be a better option but I like the idea of being in the A/C when it's 100+ degrees here in Texas and having the ability to actually see the screen with the bright sunshine.
 
Falling Sky, I don't think money is a primary driver in this conversation. You can do anything with the right amount of money, but I have a hard time believing it would be 1600-2100 to extend my tx controls.

Are you always just a troll, or do you provide value to these forums?
 
friscoflyer said:
Are you always just a troll, or do you provide value to these forums?

He's just some kid who has been begging us for attention lately, do yourself a favor and go ahead and block him (on your User Control Panel, the "friends and foes" tab).
 
friscoflyer said:
Falling Sky, I don't think money is a primary driver in this conversation. You can do anything with the right amount of money, but I have a hard time believing it would be 1600-2100 to extend my tx controls.

Are you always just a troll, or do you provide value to these forums?

It would run you around $200 for a secondary transmitter and wifi repeater. Tho every time you switch you will have to rebind them which can be a pain.
 
It's better to do the mod that adds an RP-SMA jack on the DJI repeater, this way you can just screw\unscrew the to-link antennas as needed.
 

Recent Posts

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
143,066
Messages
1,467,352
Members
104,933
Latest member
mactechnic