Bluetooth range limit test

On this thursday 21st 2pm, the weather was ok and I asked my daughter to come in the garden to see how far the connection from the Asus Eee netbook to the kopter could reach.

After a short test flight I fixed the Ixus 70 on board and flew high and far.

Amazing how far the Bluetooth connection works. After some distance, my daughter told me the connection is interrupted and I wanted to bring the kopter back.

There was some wind and the kopter was away further than I anticipated.

It did not come back to me - the small spot (kopter) at the sky did not become bigger.

Now what - fly around more trying to get it back risking it goes away even further or even runs out of battery power and drops from the sky?

I decided to go into slow descent and let it dissapear behind the horizon (neighbours door).

The area I think it went down is quite big because I don't know how far from me it was My younger daughter shared out flyers in all mailboxes in the neighbourhood on the next day, the 22nd, and I spend hours on saturday the 23rd looking around in their gardens without finding anything. Now that I'm writing this 10 days have passed already - still no news from the kopter.

The picture below shows the scene from a different angle. I was standing in the garden much lower than this viewpoint. That explains why I don't know better where it went down.

As sad as I am to have lost the kopter and the camera, there are some good points in this:

• nobody got hurt
• lesson learnt: for range limit tests go to a wide field

flying with snow in the garden | Building the next Kopter