Second tow on the 7th of december 2003.
On the evening of the
6th of december 2003 I managed to tie a black-and-white mini-cam into
my wing. The mini-cam is tied to an A-line, it's battery to a B-line,
and the video cable then runs along that B-line towards my harness,
where the handycam is located.
The connector near the camera was probably not fully seated. This
means that during interesting moments, the connection failed, the
mini-cam lost power, and reset. It then takes a couple of seconds to
regain its automatic exposure control setting. I've cut most of these
segments out.
The video below is my second flight of that day. There is a strong
cross-wind from the left. Due to the canals in the fields, we don't
have the option of rotating the winch-and-start through 50 or so
degrees as would have been better that day. Note that I'm now starting
from the other end of the field as on the first flight. This is the
flight where we learned that the wind was not completely 90 degrees to
the fiedl, but higher up the wind was better for a start from this end
of the field. The result is that this time I reached about 250m,
whereas the first time I only got to about 170m.
In the video, you see:
- Moving from aside the launch to the launch place by kiting the
wing.
- Our instructor then tries to attach the towline. However this
requires me to be more still than the wind allowed. Wing drops to the
ground.
- A new launch. Again the camera goes off during the most
interesting time. :-(
- The tow. As you can see, I get blown aside to the right.
- At the end of the tow, the line breaks about 2m away from me.
This causes the 2m of cable to snap into my face. It then takes me a
while to figure out why my vision is so blurred: I lost one of the
lenses from my glasses....
- Not much interesting from here on: with just one "working" eye,
I'm not going to do interesting things. :-(
The video (6:31, 25Mb)
The video is quite large. I scaled it down to 360x288, and I set the
bitrate to 500kbps. I find the quality barely acceptable. If anybody
can teach me to get better quality for less bandwidth, please do
so. :-) Keep in mind that I use Linux, and don't have any Microsoft
Windows machine available.
Rogier Wolff