ARRL Field Day

Put up a Super Antennas YP-2 2-element portable Yagi for 20m, on temporary mast leaning against the house. Antenna was about 5.5m above ground.
This antenna used to be offered by W6MMA.

Graupner Cherry Rebuild

Had flown a Graupner Cherry II when it first came out. Was comparably heavy back then with NiCd batteries and somewhat under-powered.
Recently found one on EBay, which had a fiberglass fuse compared to the soft plastic fuse of my earlier one. Unfortunately, crashed on the first landing. Reason was probably that I had the airlerons mixed to both move down to slow the plane for landing. While the plane did slow down, it also suddenly rolled over and fell out of the sky.





Decided to build up a Cherry look-a-like as a purely wooden construction. Used the one remaining wing from the crash as a template. Compared a scanned copy of the airfoil with others in Profili, found a good match in the Eppler E211. The wing is fully sheeted, with a slight undercamber. To build the wing, the bottom sheeting was placed onto standoffs with a contour matching the underside of the ribs; ribs and spars were added, then the top sheeting.

Wingspan	2.2m
Length	1.02m
Wing Area	35.5dm2
Weight	1.250 kg (with battery)
Airfoil	E211
Motor	MVVS 3.5/1200
Battery	3cell LiPo, 2500mAh
Prop	10x6 Aeronaut CAM
Max Current	About 30 Amp

First flight was in January 2015. Rapid vertical climbout on full throttle. Can easily take off on half throttle. Slows down nicely when just gliding around. Now pulling ailerons 'up' for landing instead of 'down' to avoid tip-stalls. Still needs long approach because of flat glide path.

What would have been nice: Rudder control for better looking tight circles, and inner wing flaps for landing.

Still, fun airplane and the MVVS motor turned out to be terrific: Easy to mount in comparably tight glider noses, amazing climbout. Example for flying it one summer morning: About 2 minutes of motor runtime resulted in 18+ minutes of flying!



On another summer morning, achieved a 28 minute flight with 4 minutes of motor runtime. Still having trouble spotting thermals "right then" when flying thought them, but at the end of a flight it's pretty obvious when there must have been some. KCRC Model-of-the-month in August 2016.