FT Versa Blunt Nose - FPV with autopilot

Almost exactly a year ago I ventured into the hobby of RC flight as a complete newbie. Inspired by the great team at flitetest.com I began building their planes, beginning with the FT Flyer..then graduating to the Delta, then the Versa, the Baby Blender, the Spitfire, and the Viggen. I also built the free plans F-35v2 from RCPowers out of foam board.

I started off with the OrangeRX T-Six transmitter and the orange receivers. Great little transmitter. Then though I began with the idea of building a medium range FPV platform and decided to use the FT Versa Blunt Nose as the platform of choice. I started with the Orange RX R620 and a satellite receiver. The wing runs with a 3S 4000MAh battery for the flight electronics and a 3S 1000MAh to run the 5.8GHz transmitter. So, the plane comes in a bit heavy. I tried running it on the original Versa motor from Lasertoyz.com (GT2210/09) but even with a 9x6 prop it didnt give me enough power to fly properly and the motor overheated in the effort. I ended up re-purposing the motor from my Baby Blender (GT2218/09) and swinging a 10x6 prop from it. That then finally did the job. 

Since I never really had done FPV, I was worried that if I flew out of range, or lost my bearings I would loose the plane. Right around then Hobbyking came out with their $70 T1000FC autopilot. I set it up with the failsafe on the receiver to go half throttle and switch to return to home mode if I ever lost signal by flying out too far. It actually happened and you can see it in the video here - failsafe kicks in at around 2:20 or so (I subtitled it).

Obviously, flying out a bit on FPV makes telemetry quite attractive. I know that the APM boards and other OSD's deliver that, but it's on-screen and the price tag is quite a bit higher than the T1000FC autopilot. In the end, I opted for the FrSky Taranis and the X8R receiver (with telemetry) as I wanted to upgrade anyways. I ordered the altitude sensor (Variometer) and the lipo battery sensor. I love this transmitter, it is incredibly versatile and has the added benefit to log all telemetry and it can be set to speak a warning if the transmitter signal is too low, or the altitude, or anything else as that matter. No need to look at any screen or take up screen real estate and have to add a DVR just to record the telemetry coming through the OSD. It's a monster of a transmitter and I can't agree more with all those that state that it is the best thing out there for this price. 

It looks that with little effort, using the Taranis and the X8R receiver, I can easily fly out 1.6km (or a mile) before RSSI signal strenth drops below 45Dbi - which is still a ways from loosing signal altogether. I'm quite sure that I could make it 2 miles without too much of a problem. My limiter so far is my video signal, which I start loosing right around 1.6km. Here my farthest flight yet with this setup:

My general equipment and fpv setup is here:

The diversity receiver (has two receivers each with it's own antenna) and the LCD screen:

P.S. - Miss you David Windestal!