Jan 25, 2015 - "Lost and Found!"
I'm flying my new WLToys v666 "Cyclone" FPV quadcopter (really cheap FPV, short range). The first 3 minutes are flying around my backyard and over the house and stuff, but then I go too high and the wind starts to take it away, and then I start to lose the signal to control it (drop-outs). I desperately try to fly home, but there is too much wind, it gets further way, and completely drops out of control range. Far away I see it falling out of the sky over the treeline into a forest a couple streets away.
I spend the next 10 minutes (which I cut out of the video at 4:14) desperately running around through people's backyards, up and down the next street, etc, eyeing the FPV video screen which would gets fuzzier and worse when I go a couple hundred feet in the wrong direction, so eventually I am able to triangulate the location just based on video reception before the battery runs out! When the video signal gets perfectly clear I know I am close, then I look down and find it upside down in the snow 6 feet from where I am standing in the forest!
The last half of video is me running home, talking to neighbors on the way, and examining the quad back on the kitchen table.
The video uses YouTube stabilization to help smooth it out, and of course suffers horribly from the low YouTube bitrate muddiness, especially in the tree branches all blending together into brown soup! The original Mobius (strapped on with a rubber band) 1080-30p footage is sharp and crystal clear and very shakey.
