On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 08:41:02AM -0700, Dave Brombaugh wrote: | I spent the rest of the afternoon searching for it. One thing I learned | - a 3M plane is pretty big when it's nearby, but when it's potentially | lost in a huge space, it suddenly seems awful tiny.
That's gotta hurt. I feel for you ... | I did have my name and address in the airplane, hopefully sometime as | the season goes on, someone might give me a call and let me know they | found it. That's probably the best thing you can do. Personally, I put them in a few places on the plane, and make them waterproof just in case the plane isn't found right away. | This got me thinking - what kinds of recovery systems do you folks use | in your airplanes (or, do you?)? I put these in my planes - http://www.hobbico.com/accys/hcap0335.html They're pretty loud if mounted properly (with the speaker open to the outside), and will let you hear your plane from a hundred or so yards away, maybe more if it's quiet. And at $15 each (less in quantity) I can easily put one in every plane. I don't know if it would have helped much in your situation (but it might have, if you'd happened to get close to your plane while you were looking for it.) If you've never had to find a plane lost in the trees, it's amazing how easy it is to miss a plane that's only 10 yards away, over and over and over. Without the alarm, the alternative is to wiggle the sticks and hope you can hear the servos, but that's only good for a few feet at best. | If I had some sort of transmitter in it, perhaps I would have had a | chance at recovering it. The ideal 'something' would be a 'thing' | that would transmit its location. The receiver would plug into a | GPS, or into a laptop with a GPS, and be able to say "Bing - your | plane is here (give or take 3 meters)." Well, if you had any sort of telemetry at all, and it was still functioning after the crash, you could use standard transmitter location techniques (your local hams could help with that) to find it. At least until the battery died. They do sell transmitters meant for plane location, I see them advertised in the AMA magazine every month, but they're mostly meant for free flight planes and I don't know if you'd really want to use them. Basically they just consist of a transmitter and a receiver with a directional antenna. Does anybody sell something that has a GPS and transmits it's coordinates? It could certainly be done, though I'd personally rather just spend my money on a telemetry transmitter of some sort (I'm really tempted to. Are there any out there that are relatively inexpensive?) and make a directional antenna for my receiver `just in case'. Though I've never run into a case where my Hobbico Air Alerts didn't let me find my lost planes pretty quickly. | P.S. (I've already said it) - I really loved that airplane. A 7037 | Compulsion is an excellent aircraft. Good luck ... hopefully you'll get a phone call soon, from somebody who found this glider that did a nice landing in their grassy field. -- Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED] /earth: file system full. Please delete anybody you can. RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off.
