I have been thinking about sending my X-UAV Talon on a 100km flight and despite pondering it for a long time today I hit the milestone in an unplanned way.
During a checkout flight for our spare support aircraft for West Coast UAV's entry in the 2016 Medical Express challenge I noticed that we had an amazingly efficient combination of airframe/motor/prop and the numbers were looking good for a 100km run.
So up the Talon went carrying 20AH of 3S Multistar batteries driving a NTM1100KV motor and APC 12x10 prop. The average speed was kept low and despite encountering some airspeed measurement issues it crossed the 100km mark at just over 1 hour and 40 minutes airborne.
The landing was unfortunately a bit hairy and fast as the voltage had dropped fairly low and the airframe copped a few dents but really happy to have knocked over the 100km milestone.
Comments
Well done Ben and team, just given you a 100km badge ;-) I love the Talon have 3 of them.
Pascal - Given it was a test air-frame focused on distance traveled (rather then long range out and back) the RC was pretty vanilla 2.4Ghz and telemetry the usual 100mw 900MHz units on a Pixhawk. For the competition we are running a dual redundant RFD900 IP link plus 3G/4G VPN.
John - The setup is mainly for the competition where we only need to be able to travel a maximum of 60km with about 10 minutes loiter time. We stuck with 3S as a lot of the ancillary equipment for the competition (BEC running companion computers, cameras, radios etc.) was must easier to power from a 3S main supply. If configuring for ultra-long range would consider a higher cell count.
Impressive. But why 3S? On paper a least, you should get even better efficiency using 6S and a 550KV motor.
Nice ! Talon is still a good an robust platform.
Any details on RC / telemetry stuffs ?
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