Long Range Autonomous Versa-Wing
This is an autonomous FPV wing that I built around March/2020. The airframe is based off the FT-VersaWing made out of dollar tree foam board. It uses a pixhawk flight controller running Ardupilot Firmware connected to a 2.4Ghz telemetry radio with the black dipole antenna seen on the right side. On the top there's a 1.2Ghz video transmitter connected to a left hand circularly polarized antenna I designed, it's made from some 14 AWG solid core wire and some rg223 coax from SurplusGizmos. To assist with the whole autonomous plane thing the lil-buddy got 2 IMUs, 2 compasses, a GPRS radio, a built in altimeter, and I later added a pedo tube for better autonomous landings. While the whole process was super fun and I learned a lot, I later realized that living in Portland presents a few problems for this airframe design. As it turns out we have a few trees here that make suitable flying locations for a speedy 2.3Lb aircraft difficult to find.
Modfied to Run OpenTX Firmware
BiQuad Antena For The Long Range Wing
This Is an imitation of a 1.2Ghz 10DBIC BiQuad antenna made by Video Aerial Systems called the crosshair extreme. I was too cheap to spend $300 on a decent antena so I watched some videos, red some forum posts and used some online calculators to design this antena. One day I hope to characterize this antena but until then it seemed to work alright.
