Moving forward with the ‘Drone

Recently I decided it was time to move forward with the Peace Drone, or as I call it, Death Drone. I pulled the 72MHz Corona receiver out, and replaced it with a UHF Dragon Link receiver. As expected, this allows for longer range flying with a solid radio link. I mounted the UHF antenna out about 2/3 of the way to the right wing tip to keep it separated from the electronics in the fuselage. RSSI was great, but the Drone wanted to yaw to the right quite a bit! Anyone that’s flown a Peace Drone will tell you that yaw stability is not it’s strong suit. Since that test flight, I’ve moved the antenna back to the center of the plane to get rid of that yaw effect. Hopefully it will fly well again now, and the RSSI won’t suffer. While I was moving things around, I moved the EzOSD main board and GPS receiver farther back, behind the canard. I was having a tough time getting a GPS lock and setting home position. Sander suggested it could be the camera or vTX too close to the GPS antenna, which are both in the nose. Testing indoors shows promising results! Where I was waiting 10 minutes or more for a lock, I’m not getting a lock inside the house at night, in around 2 minutes. I expect it can only get better once I get outside on a clear day.

Here’s the test flight after adding the UHF receiver with it’s antenna on the right wing. I haven’t had a chance to fly again after the other changes, but when I do I’ll post it up!