I decided to use the Parkzone T-28 as the initial plane for my APM. I picked it beacause it is a straight forward 4 channel foam plane that fits in my trunk assembled and it has a huge removable canopy. I am going to move the tail servos to the fuselage just ahead of the tail, install a seperate nose wheel steering servo under the nose, and move the battery forward. This will completely empty out the large area under the canopy for the electronics. I also cut the bottom of the canopy flush to increase the space.
The pictures are of a quick mock up to check the center of gravity before I do anything permanant. It looks like it is in the ballpark.
Another good feature is that somewhere I saw a replacement canopy with a camera on it, it looks like it would be easy to make also.
I like flying this plane and learned a lot while flying it. I am building a completely new plane for the APM, the old one has been through a lot! I am wondering if anybody else is using this or similar planes?
Replies
Hi John,
I've been using a T-28 troughout the last year getting my first experience with Ardupilot. The T-28 is a great plane, stable and forgiving just what one needs to get into this. before I had the Ardupliot I was doing an FPV flight when I lost orientation an flew out of range. Driving around with my son wearing the gogles and using a directional antenna we found it 5km downwind sitting in a field fully unharmed. Since then I changed to the Multiplex Mentor bas i needed more space to combine Ardupilot and FPV.
Regards
Henk
I have used a few different motors, but with the autopilot I used an E-flight park 450 motor, because it seemed smooth, quiet, and efficient. I have always used a 3s 2200 mAh battery in the T-28.
I have almost an hour flight time on this new T28 build and it is working very well. I initially had the 3DR Radio mounted in the space between the wing and fuselage but that caused interference resulting in aileron jitter. working great so far.