Comment by Roberto Hawkowski on September 26, 2009 at 3:59am

Nice music, nice video...
Can you explain how it is related to autopilot work? How does "automatic compass steering" work?

Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on September 26, 2009 at 6:15am

Now I need to get into that, what a fabulous spot and beautiful airframes. Where should I start looking on the web?? Hardly any wind that day.

Comment by Morli_ on October 26, 2009 at 1:28pm

trying to locate where I could buy " automatic compass steering" or find more about it . Also could not loacate even one online shop to buy F1E gliders !!! :( any pointers or lead is much appreciated.

Moderator Comment by Varga András on October 26, 2009 at 3:05pm

First, sorry for being late with the answers.
Roberto Hawkowski:

It's a simple heading stabilization that utilizes a compass. You can see an AlNiCo magnet rod (14) that can turn around its shaft(9) on a bearing (12 and 13) an point towards North. You can set the angular position of the rudder (6) relatively to this magnet rod, so the magnet rod and the rudder will turn together. As a result, your plane will fly towards the direction you just set and it will automatically keep this direction. Though it's not GPS navigation, I think this is somehow relevant to DIYDrones. Some guys in Italy and Switzerland use electronic magnetometers like CMPS03.

Gary Mortimer and morli:
The site of the owner of this video is here, he is Polish: http://modelpiotrekf1e.pl.tl/Technika.htm
Bad news: THIS IS REALLY-REALLY EXPENSIVE TO BUY.
Look at Victor Pairely's page, he is a Moldavian aeromodeller who sells his F1E products:
http://www.paireli.com/lang-en/price/f1e-models.html An assembled model costs about 700 Euro! Unfortunately this category seems to have the same problem as most categories, you have to be rich.
The model you see at 1:33 is designed and built by me. It costs about 100 Euro only, its only disadvantage is that I won't win a World Championship with that.

Comment by Adam French on September 3, 2011 at 6:35am

This is awesome. 

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