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OOPS! I did it again...

Joined
Mar 2, 2017
Messages
211
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Age
68
Location
The Netherlands
While doing what will become my collection of springtime flowers in bloom I decided to do a couple of passes over a field of oilseed raap. As I flew low over the field I neared some high-tention pylons. Having read on one of the other threads that the freq. disruption these cause was not withing the bandwidth of the drone AND having flown under some pylons several weeks earlier without problems, I didn't pay them much attention. Yes, bad move.

Suddenly I lost signal and a red alert flashed onto the ST16 reporting electromagnetic interferance. The TH shot ahead under the lines and turned 90* to the left and then again in the opposite direction. I flipped the RTH switch when it suddenly occured to me that these powerlines were quite a bit lower than normal and the 30m return heigth would most likely bring it directly into to cable. So I switched the RTH back off again. My hope was the TH would go into a hover and wait for me to take control. By this point my observer and I had lost sight of the Typhoon. So we jumped into the car and headed in the general direction of where we last saw it.
I drove with the ST16 out the open window (with the srap around my neck) and we franticly tried to re-establish contact. 30 minutes of driving about and we found nothing. This was all open farmland crisscrossed with drainage cannals so getting from one place to the other was a bit of a challange.After more than an hour searching I was close to giving up. I suggested to my brother-in-law that we head back toward a recently plowed fallow field of short grass. I had seen what looked like a dark clump in the distance that might perhaps be the drone.

So we did another circuit of the farmland, checking the original launch site on the way just in case, and arrived at the field in question. Yes I did see something dark in the distance so we got out and started walking toward it. As we got closer the dark patch started looking ever more like a big green weed. My heart sunk as it became apparent that this wasn't what I was looking for.

Suddenly an alert popped up on the controller which was still running. "Typhoon has entered 5 rotor mode. Return and land immediately" I touched the screen and the alert disappeared to be replaced by the most wonderfull little green arrow I have ever seen. If I was younger, I would name one of my kids after it.

I followed the arrow and after about 50m there it was. My typhoon was so glad to see me it just kept on beeping in greeting. Four props were broken, 2 on each opposite side. The right landing strut was broken at the retract lever and nowhere to be seen. The CGO+3 was torn off and about 10m away. This was my secondnd and I hope last crash.

Fortunately I was able to buy the slip-ring cable harness and the same shop also sells the "lever only" from the landing gear motor assembly. Not hard to replace and 20% of the cost of what the complete unitcost here in Europe. I do wish they had the mounting pins for the camera mount. I know vertigo drones used to have them but I no longer see them listed. I was planning on having my brother who still lives in the US send me several.

Now one little Idea I had was to create an elastic tether on the gimbal mount between the upper and lower plate. In the event of the mounting pins breaking this might prevent to slip-ring harnass from getting yanked out. What do you think?
 
Wow! What a great story. That has to be the best "good news" post I have seen. I don't think I have heard of that particular ST16 Notification.

Good luck going forward. Some use a light mono-filament line loop to keep the cam from falling away.
 
Looking back at when I found the drone, I noticed that the landing struts had extended and judging by the way the props had broken, it had most likely tumbled head over heals. I conclude it must have been moving at a reasonable speed an hit at a shallow angle. In retrospect it might have been better if I had boosted the altitude up to maybe 60 meters when it happened. I am pretty sure it lost all gps sats and perhaps the compass as well. After putting it all back together I received several alerts to recalibrate the compass before flying. Getting it up high would have given it a breather to re-establish gps contact without hitting anything.
Ah well... hindsight is allways 20-20
 
It does make me wonder really how great the H520 will be for power line surveying (how they advertise it) when things like this happen to the H. Maybe they have shielded the internals better on the H520, possibly added a redundant compass/GPS module to help which would be really nice.
 

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