Day: September 20, 2010

I had a really good day on Saturday but was too busy doing other stuff to write this up yesterday. A week ago I tried to link my camcorder into the comms system but without success because I’d connected a cable incorrectly. I’d planned a round trip out to Battle, Hastings and Rye passing overhead the Bewl reservoir and a return via Tenterden so on Saturday I made sure I connected the camcorder up properly this time. It was more in hope than expectation I have to admit, but in fact, I got 60 minutes-worth of video with excellent sound before the tape ran out just after Tenterden on my final leg back into Linton.

As this was the first attempt, I wasn’t wholly surprised to find that I’d aimed the camcorder a bit too low so although I’ve edited the 60 minutes down to about 10 and will be placing the video in the gallery (more for sentimental reasons than anything else really 🙂 ) I’ll not be including a direct link to it here on the main blog. But what I will show instead as a flavour of what I managed to get, is a short clip of the take off, so here’s the link to that. Just click on the pic to see the clip.

I’ve got my Canon camcorder mounted with a cheap plastic clamp from Ebay on a cross tube behind me in the cabin and I’m very happy with these initial results. Changing the aiming is not a problem but what I’m particularly pleased about is the nice sound balance between background sound (engine etc), comms system and intercom. I think it bodes very well for the future and I’m looking forward to making some more videos while the weather is good, especially including take offs and landings.

As the Autumn begins to approach, Bob announced at the week-end that Linton’s main runway will soon be closing and we’ll have to use the shorter Winter runway instead. To prepare myself, I thought I’d give it a go for both landing and take off on Saturday and had no problem with either. Partly it’s because I’ve been used to having trees at both ends of the runway and with Linton being so clear from both directions, it’s relatively easy I find to set your approach speed up pretty accurately making for very short landings. I’ll have to see how take offs go a bit later on when the ground becomes wetter and softer but as you can see from the YouTube clip, I got well away in plenty of time with runway to spare on Saturday. So solo at least, I don’t think there will be too much of a problem – I wonder if the faster Quik R boys will be thinking the same 😕

We’ll have to wait and see how we all do, I think, just as we will with my future video exploits…