daemn42 | Big huge thermal with the Skyhunter @daemn42 | Uploaded April 2015 | Updated October 2024, 6 hours ago.
Caught a monster thermal with my Skyhunter with the motor off.
Watch the vario graph and climb rate indicator in the lower right corner of the Vector OSD. Can see lift exceeding 1200ft/min. This is with the Skyhunter, which is by no means an efficient glider with 10Ah of battery onboard.
I could have done a better job starting my turns sooner, and often made the classic mistake of flying through the greatest lift into the sink on the other side, and then turning. Some of the lift areas were really small though.
Used the Vector's 2DH mode which normally tries to hold altitude, but per my request ET added a feature so that it disables the altitude hold when the current drops below a user specified value. I have it set at 8Amps. This mode works pretty good for thermals, and was very useful in this one because it was so violent at times, I needed full stabilization just to keep the plane upright.
Note most of this less than half a mile from launch, and the aircraft was visible to my spotter.
Caught a monster thermal with my Skyhunter with the motor off.
Watch the vario graph and climb rate indicator in the lower right corner of the Vector OSD. Can see lift exceeding 1200ft/min. This is with the Skyhunter, which is by no means an efficient glider with 10Ah of battery onboard.
I could have done a better job starting my turns sooner, and often made the classic mistake of flying through the greatest lift into the sink on the other side, and then turning. Some of the lift areas were really small though.
Used the Vector's 2DH mode which normally tries to hold altitude, but per my request ET added a feature so that it disables the altitude hold when the current drops below a user specified value. I have it set at 8Amps. This mode works pretty good for thermals, and was very useful in this one because it was so violent at times, I needed full stabilization just to keep the plane upright.
Note most of this less than half a mile from launch, and the aircraft was visible to my spotter.
