No fly zone – again

This morning at Malbec.

GoPro 1 ready – check

GoPro 2 ready – check

GPS ready… GPS ready… GPS ready… No

So this time I was let down by my little Asus Zenpad tablet that I’ve been successfully using as my MemoryMap GPS system for what, four years? No matter how many times I rebooted it, no GPS, so no flight possible.

Luckily I have a second, new tablet that I bought a few weeks ago because I thought it would give a brighter image than my phone for drone use. In the event, probably because it was another Chinese ‘cheapie’ it didn’t, and I was thinking whether I should pop it onto LeBonCoin and sell it on. But luckily I didn’t and it goes into MemoryMap GPS mode much quicker than the Asus ever did.

Unfortunately I’d left it back in my caravan and by the time I’d finished messing about with the Asus and also one of my GoPros and returned to get it, it was already well past 11.00 am and getting far too hot to fly. One of the big drawbacks of flying from Malbec is its short runway. It’s demanding at the best of times and with the inevitable thermals that start up on its approach, resulting in lift followed by sink followed by lift again, it can become a shade treacherous when the weather heats up. And by the time I was ready to go it was already about 28 degrees Celsius, meaning that by the time I got back, it would have been 30 + degrees.

So that was it – flight abandoned yet again. I also had a problem again with one of my GoPros. The one I mount on the wing, a GoPro 7 Hero Black, is perfectly happy to work with a powerpack plugged in. However, it now seemed that the one that gave me trouble last time, a GoPro 8 Hero Black that I mount in the cabin, didn’t want to work in the same way, and would only connect to a powerpack if its battery was first removed. It seems weird that it did so last time, but after having switched into Timewarp mode that messed things up anyway.

After arriving home I removed the battery and replaced it with another, when it worked fine with the powerpack and continued doing so with the original battery when I replaced it. I’m really getting fed up with having to keep messing around with technology that seems to be full of gremlins.

The weather should be similar to this morning’s again tomorrow, although it is forecast to become hotter than this afternoon later on. So with a bit of luck if all the ruddy gremlins stay in their boxes I might finally get my planned flight in tomorrow. It’s a bit disappointing because things will be busier tomorrow, and in particular there could be gliders operating at Castelsarrasins where I hope to do a touch-and-go. Mind you, I suppose I’ll have to think myself lucky if I just manage to get away on time…