HELICOPTERS Park Pilot
More quad racing
Chris Mulcahy
cspaced@gmail.com
>>
Without a doubt, I absolutely love fl ying helicopters.
I’ve also fl own multirotors for many years—not so much for the fun aspect of fl ying (let’s face it, they can be a little autonomous sometimes), but for aerial photography. A new bug has recently bitten me, and by recently I mean roughly a year ago. I touched on it in the fall 2015 issue— it’s FPV racing. For those who don’t know,
FPV stands for First-Person View and usually involves strapping a camera and
a video transmitter to an aircraft while the pilot uses either a monitor or goggles to receive the image while fl ying. This gives the pilot a fi rst-person view from the aircraft. It’s an exhilarating way to fl y. This in itself is a lot of fun, but combine it with racing, and it’s elevated to a whole new level! I like to tinker a little, but
I defi nitely prefer to fl y more than tinker, so I relied on the expertise of a few friends when it came time for me to build my own racer. There is a lot of technical information you can sink your teeth into with FPV, especially if you choose to build your own aircraft, or you can simply buy a ready to fl y model, of which more are becoming
available by the day. I chose to build my own and had a great time doing it. I featured the build in my December 2015 column in Model Aviation, but the basic outline is that you need several components. You need to choose an airframe, fl ight controller, motors, and ESCs. I chose a 250-size airframe with an OpenPilot (
openpilot.org) CC3D Atom fl ight controller running Cleanfl ight (cleanfl
ight.com), an open-source fi rmware. There is much soldering and some improvising involved and Google is defi nitely your friend during the build! If you have any experience with soldering, construction will be a breeze. My experience on the
racecourse at the Heli Extravaganza fun-fl y, held in September at the Triple Tree Aerodrome (
tripletreeaerodrome.com) in South Carolina, showed me a few things. I had two initial problems to begin with and neither was related to the equipment I was using. For some reason, I found
myself holding my breath while racing! As ridiculous as it sounds, I kept catching myself draw in a big lungful of air once every lap. I couldn’t fi gure out why I was doing it, and thought it must have been because of the extreme concentration while in the heat of the moment! Whatever the reason, I
found a simple cure, which was to chew some gum.
My 250-size FPV racer, headset, and spare parts are all kept in one tidy case!
26 PARK PILOT [Winter 2016]
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