Watching Ron Wanttaja's Tail Rise

Ouch. I see that guy is making his profit on the shipping!
I bought one of these cameras a couple of years ago for use in my RC
planes (haven't yet), cost me about $60 then. You definitely need to
have the Rx on a TV so you can tune it. Longest range is supposed to be
1000', but I'm sure thats under best conditions.

There's also some concern that the frequency the wireless camera is on
(900mhz) bleeds over into the aircraft frequencies? Never saw any
definite proof about this.

John

Ron, That was a pretty cool video, and that prop effect was just plain
weird!
Where do you fly from? I'd hate to have to find that field among all the
industrial buildings the first time!

John

On Sun, 31 Oct 2004 10:07:53 -0600, "JohnT." wrote:

Ron, That was a pretty cool video, and that prop effect was just plain
weird!

I liked Carlos' explanation. It's too bad the effect is there; now that I know
the setup can work, I could probably spend a few more bucks on a decent camera
and duplicate it without the squiggle. But now that I've done it, the urge is
off. I haven't even touched the camera since I put it on the axle for the
Arlington fly-in back in July. I'd like to do a wing-tip mounting (pointing
towards the cockpit) but I'm not too confident on the whether the wingtip light
mount could take the drag load with the camera pointed sideways..

Where do you fly from? I'd hate to have to find that field among all the
industrial buildings the first time!

I fly from Scobee Field, Auburn, Washington (S50). It's located in
~2.5-mile-wide valley, with, as you note, industrial buildings all around. One
saving grace is that the airport is located directly next to the Emerald Downs
horse-racing track, which has a large grandstand building painted bright green.
They light it up nicely at night, too...here's a picture I took from the west
side of the valley with about ~75 feet of ground fog on the valley floor:

http://www.wanttaja.com/nighttime1.jpg

The green splotch to the left of center is the race track.

Two other points of local interest from the video: During the takeoff, you can
make out a set of large powerlines about quarter-mile north of the runway (ahead
of the plane on takeoff). These are the powerlines a local student flew through
about ten years ago:

http://www.wanttaja.com/avlinks/wire.htm

(BTW, the airplane was repaired and is still flying from Auburn.)

The second point...when I turn from crosswind to downwind, just for a
moment...you can see my house. :-)

Ron Wanttaja

Ron Wanttaja wrote:

Two other points of local interest from the video: During the takeoff, you can
make out a set of large powerlines about quarter-mile north of the runway (ahead
of the plane on takeoff). These are the powerlines a local student flew through
about ten years ago:

http://www.wanttaja.com/avlinks/wire.htm

(BTW, the airplane was repaired and is still flying from Auburn.)

What a shame, especially after she went to all that trouble of making it
looke Mooney'ish...

Ron, I tuned in late on this topic, but the server dropped anything older
than a couple of days. I missed seeing what camera you are talking about.
It sounds good, but I'd like to look into it more.

Ron - 7S5

"Ron Wanttaja" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 20:43:16 GMT, UltraJohn
wrote:

Ron Wanttaja wrote:

Neat. And good resolution for a $125 camera too:

And the camera price has come down, too... less than $100 at Target.

And for a mere $125 your can get a 1GB CF card to give you over 2 1/2
hours
of video!

Unfortunately, the two AA-cells that run the camera seem to last only
about 45
minutes or so...they've been nearly dead at the end of all my on-gear
flights.
Could rig an external pack without too much problem, though.

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:08:30 GMT, "Cy Galley" wrote:

]At our last EAA Chapter 75 meeting one of our members demonstrated a size
of
]a quarter camera, transmitter that you just duct tape on. Receiver plugs
]into a VCR and the tape can them be played. We played it a Big screen
for
]everyone to see with an LCD projector--- Cost of the camera, transmitter
]receiver with shipping was $31.00

Still requires a battery-operated VCR to tape in flight.... ain't got one
of
them, either! Saw the cameras at Oshkosh a couple of years back,
certainly cool
little things.

Several years back, my wife picked up a couple of sets of battery-operated
closed-circuit TVs. These have wireless cameras talking to dedicated B&W
5"
video monitors. I strapped a couple of the cameras on the backs of RC
race
cars. Pretty wild. When the batteries in the cars get low, they run slow
enough to give the wife's cats a sporting chance... :-)

I had debated using one of these cameras on the airplane, but was stymied
by the
lack of a battery-powered VCR.

]The camera was taped on the landing gear of a Q-200 and by using the
viewer
]of the VCR, his son was able to tell his dad the pilot how to turn to
]capture the other plane in flight.

Ah, *there's* an application I can appreciate. I've always wanted to rig
up a
minicamera like that to the viewfinder of a standard camera, and haul a
extendable ~10 foot pole to fly-ins. Get near a cool airplane, run the
camera
atop the pole, and get a nice shot from an unusual angle without so many
people
in the way.

Ron Wanttaja

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 07:03:50 -0800, "Ron" no one @home.com wrote:

Ron, I tuned in late on this topic, but the server dropped anything older
than a couple of days. I missed seeing what camera you are talking about.
It sounds good, but I'd like to look into it more.

Ron - 7S5


http://www.bowersflybaby.com/pix/video.html

I used to design digital cameras so maybe I can provide a little
insite. The imager is exposed in a sequential fashion moving top to
bottom (or vise versa). The length of the expose is granular to the
number of scan line times that the pixels are allowed to soak up
protons before being dumped out. The brighter the scene is (worst
case being a sunny day) the narrower the electronic horizontal shutter
is and the better it will be able to stop motion. So on a sunny day
with a propeller you are getting a picture of the propeller at
slightly different times (hence the bent appearance) with a sharp
enough picture to see the distortion. A way around this is to force
the camera to use a longer exposure and make the propeller blur into
the form that people are used to looking at. You could do this by
putting a neutral density filter in front of the lense, thus making
the AGC crank in a longer exposure.

An interesting anecdote about the horizontal shutter: I was told that
the reason that old cartoon showed race cars with the wheels shaped
like ovals when they were going fast was because people had seen
photographs of race cars going by and the mechanical shutter had put
this effect into the image.



"Ron Webb" wrote in message ...
An interesting effect with the prop. I suppose it is some digital version of
the frame rate vs prop RPM stroboscope effect that we are used to seeing,
but modified because of the digital camera thing.

Anybody got a better explaination?


Ron Webb



" jls" wrote in message
...
Neat. And good resolution for a $125 camera too:

http://www.bowersflybaby.com/pix/video.html

I thought I already posted this explanation but its a day later and I
don't see it so here goes again...

The camera scans its electronic shutter from top to bottom. On a
bright sunny day, the AGC sets the shutter to be a narrow horizontal
slit and because its such a short exposure (as short as 1/15,000) the
camera has the ability to capture the propeller in motion. If you put
a filter in front of the lense (neutral density filter) the AGC of the
camera will lengthen the exposure and make the propeller blur the way
people are used to. The stronger the filter the better but stop
before you start seeing noise in the image. And just so you know the
rough order of the amount of attenuation you'll need on that filter,
understand that the light outside may be 100 times brighter than
inside so you might want something like 99% attenuation.

Regards


"Ron Webb" wrote in message ...
An interesting effect with the prop. I suppose it is some digital version of
the frame rate vs prop RPM stroboscope effect that we are used to seeing,
but modified because of the digital camera thing.

Anybody got a better explaination?


Ron Webb



" jls" wrote in message
...
Neat. And good resolution for a $125 camera too:

http://www.bowersflybaby.com/pix/video.html

Hello, Ron!
You wrote on Sat, 30 Oct 2004 19:27:48 GMT:

?? Neat. And good resolution for a $125 camera too:

RW And the camera price has come down, too... less than $100 at Target.

is that a crack in the landing gear? - just above the left bolt

With best regards, ahlbebuck. E-mail:

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:14:24 +0200, "ahlbebuck" wrote:

Hello, Ron!
You wrote on Sat, 30 Oct 2004 19:27:48 GMT:

?? Neat. And good resolution for a $125 camera too:

RW And the camera price has come down, too... less than $100 at Target.

is that a crack in the landing gear? - just above the left bolt

The crack is actually the location of a non-structural butt joint. The gear
itself is laminated from 1/4" spruce, with alternate planks overlapping. The
narrow end of alternate pieces butts up against the narrow edge of another. The
glue area is so small that the glue tends to crack over time. Again, the join
isn't structural in nature...the gear laminations are held together by the
overlapping areas and pinned by the bolts holding the axle plates.

Ron Wanttaja