Ok, so let's settle the tech part first, I figured I'd get the best video by filming from under the Cularis, but since it doesn't have any gear, that means the camera is first to touch the ground on a landing. As a result, I padded it, to lessen the impact and the glue that holds it to the bottom of the glider does give out under impact.
Now, this is not ideal so my plan was also to land in the weeds like I would do at Rancho San Antonio, so the wings get caught in them and the bottom of the glider doesn't touch the ground. The weeds at Shoreline were not very tall though, and because they were far from me, I misjudged the height on landing and landed a bit hard on the ground, which did tear off the camera from the plane, but otherwise everything was fine, the padding worked and the video was intact.
All this to say that this setup however doesn't allow for easy repeated flights :) Takeoff is done at full power with a heavy toss and if I have enough back elevator I can miss the ground despite the added weight from the camera and resulting loss of aerodynamism from having that heavy block handing from under the glider.
you can see the camera under the belly
I get 20 to 25mn flight time with one battery, which was more than enough, and captured the frames below from the HD video. I'll say that unfortunately the HD video quality from my GoPro HD is far from stellar, but it beats the original video I was getting with the non HD versions that came before it (see my first attempt at it last year with my original GoPro hung from my Minimag).
The Biggest improvement from my attempt last year was that the Cularis was much bigger and easier to see from a distance. I was easily able to fly much farther from where I was standing (about a mile) without totally losing track of which way the glider was pointing and how I could still control it to fly it back (which definitely was a problem with the much smaller minimag).
Below are frames I captured from the video:
original main campus
the 'famous' bridge to 1950 :)
1950/alza
46/47
45 and the droid/eclair/cupcake
1098 and 900 alta with 101 in the background
1965
1945 and rengstroff
After getting what felt like enough passes over the campus buildings (the so called 'GWC' was a bit out of reach for safe flying), I did a few passes over the Shoreline Amphitheatre:
Putting aside the fact that my landing wasn't that stellar, this was my only flight and the video was good the first time (thankfully I had gotten some practise shooting from a distance and 'aiming' at targets from almost a mile away). The video quality wasn't awesome but I guess that's as good as you get from a cheap-ish HD camera you can stick onto a small RC plane, so it's not too bad.
