Allington on a glorious day

Well, I've been waiting for a long time, and for once a day off coincided with some sunny and breezy weather. So having done my chores, I set off to Allington Community Association to see what interesting subjects I could find. I only had an hour as I had some other bits to do. But above you can see one of the images I got looking out over the 20/20 industrial park, and can see the new incinerator chimney in th eleft background. More pictures are on my flickr photostream, follow the link at the bottom of the page.

So when I got to the field, I only had some small/medium kites in the car as it seemed quite breezy. But getting out of the car, it felt as if there was very little breeze. About the biggest kite I had with me was a 1.5M Rock from Premier. So I hooked this on the line and let it fly. It was a bit unstable so needed to be trimmed but up it went.

Then attached the camera rig and let it try to lift off the ground. Not a huge amount of lift but it slowly climbed, and I let out lots of line until I was flying out over the railway, with the camera over the trees. Then the wind dropped, and the camera was heading towards this small tree.



So some rapid work to bring the camera safely to the ground and keep the kite out of trouble. It wasn't long before we had some more lift and were able to get some half decent photographs. It was about now, whilst waiting for the camera to stabilise in the wind, that I discovered that I hadn't altered the settings to disable auto sleep, so it kept swithcing itself off! But still not a bad day.

The weather is against us

Amongst other things, the weather is conspiring to keep us out of the sky. Last thursday I went to try a bit of KAP in a local field. Two things were against me, first of all the battery in my camera had died (oops, note to self - check everything before setting out!) But also, the wind droped considerably and left the rig firmly attached to the ground.

Yesterday (Sunday) I was hoping to get some flight time in at Mote Park in Maidstone, but eh wind was so strong and gusty thet I decided that was a really bad idea.

However, we are progressing on another front. I'm now in the process of adding a video downlink to the rig. I've got most of the hardware, but needs ome components from Maplin to build a power supply. I'm hopefull of having everything built ready for testing by the weekend, so I'll be puttiong on an update then.