It's been good getting to see numerous of the
silo art sites around Vic, SA, and NSW of late.
On the return drive from
Melbourne to
Adelaide on Monday, I managed to fly the silos at
Rupanyup, Victoria, a small detour off the Western Highway, and part of the Victorian
silo art trail.
Leaving Melb at 0300, I got to
Rupanyup just on sunrise 0600.
Ok, big embarrassing admission . . .
When going to Melb the previous Friday, and filming the
Coonalpyn silo art, I had my first mishap with the Mavic Pro.
I managed to gently put it against the silo wall and slide it down to concrete about 3m below :(
Broke 2 platinum props, and damaged other 2, gimbal platform suffered some damage, but camera seemed ok.
The crash footage is on my youtube channel which is easy to find from any links to my vids.
I took this to Drone MRO in
Melbourne South, and should have it back in a few days as good as new.
I'm very grateful there was no one around to see my mishap, which could have been caused by a number of issues . . . being so close to silos I may have lost some satellite connections, which could cause it to loose gps mode and go into atti mode . . . or metal rebar in the concrete silos might have interfered with compass signals . . . another possibility is the wind was coming from the west quite strongly, I was on the eastern side, there could easily have been a low pressure system that caused the drone to drift into the silo.
Lots of lessons learned, so all good.
So . . . for this latest video, I used (for the first time) a DJI Spark, loaned from my Melb based son.
To say I was nervous is pretty accurate, as the Spark is a lot smaller, can be more wind affected, has a bit of a different controller, and lots of other small differences in features to the Mavic.
Compounding this, there are trees and overhead wires at the
Rupanyup site, which can create not only risk of impact, but electricity can affect comms with drone signals and cause control issues.
So I was flying pretty cautiously, and resulted in an edited 1-1/2 minutes quicky.
I did detour north to Sheep Hills then, took the photo of Sheep Hills silos with my phone.
The Spark only had the one battery, and although I landed at
Rupanyup with 3/4 bars power, and I did fly Sheep Hills (quite
well I thought), but . . .
The micro SD card must have been full !!!
It had many pics and vids on there from sons flights (he did say I could delete as he'd downloaded them all), and on a second short film earlier at Rup, the recording had stopped after a few seconds (unknown to me at the time), when the card must have been full.
I didn't discover this until AFTER I landed at Sheep Hills, and went to download all the vid / photos taken, there was nothing of the brilliant Sheep Hills flight :(
I'd landed with just 22% battery left, and after downloading Rup footage and formatting the card, it was down to 17%.
Although I tried for 30mins to get enough power back in for a safe follow up flight, I had to leave it and move on.
So, that site will have to wait until another trip, possibly taking in from off the Mallee Hwy, down to the Western Hwy, and get all the silo sites on that trail.
An ABC article about the artist Julia Volchkova during the
mural painting . . .
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-12/russian-street-artist-paints-silo-rupanyup/8438826
Google images of some of her art Worldwide . . . (she's very good)
Julia Volchkova images
This is a Google street view of the
Rupanyup silos before the
mural . . .
Rupanyup silos pre murals