[Elecraft] Drone antenna launch Field portable! Changed topic.

[Terry Schieler]

I have been using a Blade CX2 RC helicopter to fly antenna wires up above tree tops for quite a few years now.  I had added an LED nav light kit to the CX2 (red, green plus white landing light) and it runs off a simple on/off toggle on the transmitter.  I installed a small servo on the belly of the chopper that uses the servo arm to pull a piano-wire pin out of a U-shaped block of balsa wood.  The fish line antenna leader is hooked over the piano wire.  I installed a "Y" adapter to the navigation light circuit on the chopper and used it to fully activate the add-on (parallel) servo, which released the antenna lead-in line when it was properly hovering above the target tree.  So, when I flipped the nav light toggle to ON, the hook wire pulled back and released the fish line.  Took some experimenting with weights on the leader line to plow through some of the dense branches, but finally got it pretty consistent.  This started years before the word "drone" was common in R/C.  

Plain old radio-controlled helicopter (remember those?)

Terry, WØFM

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Thorne [mailto:rthorne at rthorne.net] 
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2017 8:11 AM
To: elecraft at mailman.qth.net
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Drone antenna launch Field portable! Changed topic.

John,

Do use a separate receiver in order to activate the release or is there an extra slot on the drone receiver?

I'm assuming your using a bind - n - fly drone.  If it's home brew with your own receiver then it probably has a spare slot that you can program a switch to?

Rich - N5ZC