You know, for all of you eschewing via legal mumbo jumbo I am a bit confused. I read up on it briefly on the internet, so it has to be true. It seems that all of the r/c type regulations apply only to things that make you money.
Plus, if I do this, and fly a nearly transparent R/C blimp across the country, not near DC, not near Groom Lake, and don't fly it into anyone's bathroom, who is even going to know or care?
tuna55 wrote: You know, for all of you eschewing via legal mumbo jumbo I am a bit confused. I read up on it briefly on the internet, so it has to be true. It seems that all of the r/c type regulations apply only to things that make you money. Plus, if I do this, and fly a nearly transparent R/C blimp across the country, not near DC, not near Groom Lake, and don't fly it into anyone's bathroom, who is even going to know or care?
Given that the FCC limits 2.4ghz RC communication length unless you intend to follow the thing your going to be up a creek on that part.
Now a few adventurous college students built a lighter then air vehicle that leaches off high power transmission lines and looks for open wifi networks to report back to base.
wearymicrobe wrote:tuna55 wrote: You know, for all of you eschewing via legal mumbo jumbo I am a bit confused. I read up on it briefly on the internet, so it has to be true. It seems that all of the r/c type regulations apply only to things that make you money. Plus, if I do this, and fly a nearly transparent R/C blimp across the country, not near DC, not near Groom Lake, and don't fly it into anyone's bathroom, who is even going to know or care?Given that the FCC limits 2.4ghz RC communication length unless you intend to follow the thing your going to be up a creek on that part. Now a few adventurous college students built a lighter then air vehicle that leaches off high power transmission lines and looks for open wifi networks to report back to base.
Yeah, the unknowns here are:
How do I control this thing hundreds of miles away?
How do I get this thing to tell me where it is and what it's seeing hundreds of miles away?
How do I get this thing to go hundreds of miles away in a controlled fashion?
Where do you plan on going? Keeping it flying overnight seems awfully difficult, why not just land it in a field somewhere where no one will find it only to take off the next morning.
Also, how do we know you're not Kim Jung-un?
tuna55 wrote: You know, for all of you eschewing via legal mumbo jumbo I am a bit confused. I read up on it briefly on the internet, so it has to be true. It seems that all of the r/c type regulations apply only to things that make you money. Plus, if I do this, and fly a nearly transparent R/C blimp across the country, not near DC, not near Groom Lake, and don't fly it into anyone's bathroom, who is even going to know or care?
Probably the guy in the GRM plane thread trying to learn how to fly his new 152.
Enyar wrote: Where do you plan on going? Keeping it flying overnight seems awfully difficult, why not just land it in a field somewhere where no one will find it only to take off the next morning. Also, how do we know you're not Kim Jung-un?tuna55 wrote: You know, for all of you eschewing via legal mumbo jumbo I am a bit confused. I read up on it briefly on the internet, so it has to be true. It seems that all of the r/c type regulations apply only to things that make you money. Plus, if I do this, and fly a nearly transparent R/C blimp across the country, not near DC, not near Groom Lake, and don't fly it into anyone's bathroom, who is even going to know or care?Probably the guy in the GRM plane thread trying to learn how to fly his new 152.
Because it's a blimp! I'd have to stare at a computer monitor for hours flying it straight ahead and land every time I needed to do anything else?
I'm thinking it defaults to neutral buoyancy somehow, even if this is a manual process done by watching an altimeter and adjusting the speed of a vertically mounted prop, and just let it go full speed ahead until someone tells it otherwise.
I'm not Kim Jong un, otherwise it wouldn't just fly around and look at stuff.
Let's say I wanted to go to your house in Tampa. Google maps shows the walking distance (mostly a straight line) at about 533 miles. If I can average 10 miles per hour, that will take two or three days. I could drop you a note saying "Hi, thanks for the tips you gave me on this awesome cross-country blimp" tied to the bottom, you could post here saying how cool it is, and then I could take it to explore the everglades, or whatever.
Maybe I want to see the Grand Canyon. From the middle. Tour the Adirondacks. It could be fun. That's it.
In terms of maintaining a constant altitude, you’d use far less power by compressing some of the gas into a tank during the day and releasing it back into the bladder at night than running a vertically mounted prop all night.
In terms of the material being strong enough to handle the gas expansion at high altitude, Perhaps an accordion arrangement could be devised to extended the bladder longitudinally fore and aft of the gondola.
Here's a thought (may have been mentioned, I didn't read all the links):
Control it through a cell phone in the plane / blimp. The cell phone has GPS and even a camera, so that works. You would just need to stay in cell service areas.
Of course there is all that "hacking the cell phone" part.
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I do not mean to rain on the parade, but this seems very unrealistic and dangerous to people that are using the airspace in a legitimate manner. You will need to navigate through this while avoiding airplanes. Hell the military spends billions and they can't do it safely.
pilotbraden wrote: <img src="
That’s it then, we’ll need to climb and hold at FL 50 to avoid traffic. What’s the average wind speed at that elevation, 100 knots plus right?
tuna55 wrote: How do I control this thing hundreds of miles away? How do I get this thing to tell me where it is and what it's seeing hundreds of miles away? How do I get this thing to go hundreds of miles away in a controlled fashion?
TCP/IP over ham radio? Or better, stateless format: UDP over ham?
I know that TCP is done, but don't know how. Maybe Tom can let us know since he's into that stuff.....
tuna55 wrote: Let's say I wanted to go to your house in Tampa. Google maps shows the walking distance (mostly a straight line) at about 533 miles. If I can average 10 miles per hour, that will take two or three days. I could drop you a note saying "Hi, thanks for the tips you gave me on this awesome cross-country blimp" tied to the bottom, you could post here saying how cool it is, and then I could take it to explore the everglades, or whatever. Maybe I want to see the Grand Canyon. From the middle. Tour the Adirondacks. It could be fun. That's it.
Oh yeah, they invented this already. It's called email/GRM blog and google street view/ maps.
tuna55 wrote: Plus, if I do this, and fly a nearly transparent R/C blimp across the country, not near DC, not near Groom Lake, and don't fly it into anyone's bathroom, who is even going to know or care?
The makers of that very same transparent blimp got it featured on an Arizona news channel as a reported UFO...people notice.
First: Maynard Hill, DC area RC modeling legend assisted by a team of local guys from my club, DCRC, successfully flew an RC plane across the Atlantic ocean, years ago.
Maynard was one of my heroes. Someone I know once said "Had Maynard Hill been Russian he'd have statues".
Also, about 20 years ago I did a consulting gig for a guy building "stealth" UAVs. I made some clear plastic ram-air parachutes similar to Jalbert parafoil kites for the paragliders. They had 30cc 2-stroke engines, huge mufflers, some simple telemetry, and video w/ tilt and swing.
He also made a clear blimp about 35' long.
Evidently when he went to demo it for the Navy at Lakehurst, it worked fine in the blimp hanger, but when the longer outdoor test was conducted - bear in mind this was in the 72+53Mhz era - it lost signal, headed for Newfoundland, and they scrambled a helicopter and someone w/ an M16 and shot it down over the Atlantic.
When he returned I asked how it had gone and he said "Aww, we got shot down". I asked why they didn't like it, which is when he explained "No, we literally got shot down"....
Just as an FYI, I still really want to do this.
I know we're trying to stick to technical discussion but it's even more illegal now 
Haven't checked back on the status of an RC autopilot system for blmps, but that remains the most significant technical roadblock to doing this.
I also keep bouncing similar ideas around in my head. I think for control, the best bet would be to use a cellular data connection in combination with an adaptive homing system that can head back to an area that had good connectivity if it gets hopelessly lost.
http://fpvlab.com/forums/forum.php
Take a look here, lots of builds that are a couple hours flight time, range using HAM is ~8-10 miles with good antennas for FPV
I believe that I can handle the software end of things with a help from a few good friends. It's just a P&ID to pick a direction and try to track to where you want to go.
How to communicate with the thing is harder. While it's sitting over the North Pole checking on ice and stuff, how can I see a picture of it? Is consumer GPS good enough to at least tell me (and it) where it is?
Yes the GPS's are pretty damn good these days, run two antennas if you want really good resolution. I would look at pixhawk before building my own. Its already done.
The long range radio is the harder part. I dont think there are many people out there who have gotten a cell based system to work at all.
Communication is not so much the hard part as the expensive part. If you had infinite money you could slap satellite communications on the thing and call it a day.
Consumer GPS is plenty good enough to tell you where the craft is, within a meter.
You could use a small single-board computer and a mosh connection to communicate.
Over cellular it's easy (all OTS stuff), but if you want to use HAM it will be hard, especially to keep secure on a medium where encryption is illegal. I'd think a large one-time-pad of smallish challenge and response codes could be a good way to authenticate commands and replies without clearly running afoul of the rules, but it's a gray area. The rest of the data would have to be sent in the clear. (Edit: Maybe just use telnet over IP over HAM for this?)
Satellite isn't much harder than cellular, but again it's expensive....and slow. Fast enough to get data and small compressed pics back, but I think you could forget about any decent video stream.
Here's how to cheat: flying wing with a thick, low speed airfoil. Fill the interior of the wing with gas bags of helium. Not enough to be completely buoyant, but minimal lift will be needed. Motors will not need to work hard, saving charge. Think John Northrop meets Count Von Zeppelin.
Appleseed wrote: Here's how to cheat: flying wing with a thick, low speed airfoil. Fill the interior of the wing with gas bags of helium. Not enough to be completely buoyant, but minimal lift will be needed. Motors will not need to work hard, saving charge. Think John Northrop meets Count Von Zeppelin.
That's not a bad idea. I could easily build a flying wing with balsa and fill it with a bladder before using monokote or whatever.
GameboyRMH wrote: Communication is not so much the hard part as the expensive part. If you had infinite money you could slap satellite communications on the thing and call it a day. Consumer GPS is plenty good enough to tell you where the craft is, within a meter. You could use a small single-board computer and a mosh connection to communicate. Over cellular it's easy (all OTS stuff), but if you want to use HAM it will be hard, especially to keep secure on a medium where encryption is illegal. I'd think a large one-time-pad of smallish challenge and response codes could be a good way to authenticate commands and replies without clearly running afoul of the rules, but it's a gray area. The rest of the data would have to be sent in the clear. (Edit: Maybe just use telnet over IP over HAM for this?) Satellite isn't much harder than cellular, but again it's expensive....and slow. Fast enough to get data and small compressed pics back, but I think you could forget about any decent video stream.
Are there consumer priced cell phone's on boards like there is in my security system base station? If so, this sounds reasonably easy, it just takes pictures and sends me a text message or whatever with its coordinates along with a big E-mail of pics, like one every few minutes or whatever.
Does that make sense?
tuna55 wrote:Appleseed wrote: Here's how to cheat: flying wing with a thick, low speed airfoil. Fill the interior of the wing with gas bags of helium. Not enough to be completely buoyant, but minimal lift will be needed. Motors will not need to work hard, saving charge. Think John Northrop meets Count Von Zeppelin.That's not a bad idea. I could easily build a flying wing with balsa and fill it with a bladder before using monokote or whatever.
Liking this more, because it would be much faster than a blimp, but have nearly all of the same benefits, and be way faster.
tuna55 wrote: Are there consumer priced cell phone's on boards like there is in my security system base station? If so, this sounds reasonably easy, it just takes pictures and sends me a text message or whatever with its coordinates along with a big E-mail of pics, like one every few minutes or whatever. Does that make sense?
Yes and yes. On boards and USB sticks, which is the form you'd probably want to use - plus a beefy antenna. The data will still be expensive though so you don't want it sending you pics willy-nilly, but storage is cheap so you could save everything and have it send just what you want to see - and maybe send a big data dump if it gets a wifi connection.
I don't think the hybrid lifting flying wing would work all that well though. It would have to be stupidly huge - like bigger than a lot of manned aircraft - to get a meaningful amount of LTA lift. It's a simple idea that hasn't been tried before and there's probably a good reason for that. I think a more blimp-like hybrid lift craft will work well, that's an idea that's already proven.
aircooled wrote: Also, once you complete a model that can navigate long distances autonomously, especially with any payload, you might want to expect a visit from homeland security.
OTOH, there are some wealthy Columbians that might sponsor this project, they like home built submarines too.
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