Well folks, after two months of work I got my new homebrew, all-aluminum Terminator T600 quad flying and it has passed all it's advanced flight tests after 17.4 hours of flight testing and tuning.

The aircraft has a wheelbase of 688mm,  a takeoff weight of 2,720 grams and thrust/weight ratio of 3.8:1.  With a Turnigy 10A 10C (non-intelligent) 4S flight battery it has a safe flight time of 36 minutes and maximum flight speed of 56mph.  It has Turnigy Elite 3508-640's spinning 16" x 5.5 carbon fiber props, Lumenier 32-bit ARM processor Silk ESC's, and a ArduPilot flight controller using the APM Flight Stack.  The radios are ham band with a FRSky Taranis, 915MHz telemetry downlink, and 600mW 5.8GHz FPV feed.  It carries a variety of camera payloads from NVDI to RGB to wide angle aerial survey cameras.
AND - it has a real landing gear that can handle landing in rough terrain without tipping over or banging the cameras on the ground.



And a photo of the P3 sitting by the T600 airframe when it was being built



It's been fun being part of the "Phantom Family" - I've flown them since the P1 and FC40 days.  But I needed a little higher end equipment than what the Phantom or Inspire comes with.  I sold my P3S today after advertising it on craigslist and hope the new owner enjoys it as much as I did.  I wasn't sure how to tell him to "activate" it with a new account, but I thought he could do it by just signing in and creating a new account, and my account would drop out.  He called me later and said he got it flying, so everything went well with the transfer of ownership.

It's been fun while it lasted and I must say I never had a single problem with any of my Phantoms in over 200 hours of flight time, other than bearings in the FC40's motors.

Looks like you built yourself a commercial drone now.

AG0N-Gary Posted at 2016-8-8 13:20
Looks like you built yourself a commercial drone now.

Hi Gary, yes that's what it's for.  I do agricultural aerial survey work and am a commercial ag pilot.  I fly a AT-802 and the UAV is used for pre and post application scouting.

Very practical.  Congratulations.

AG0N-Gary Posted at 2016-8-9 10:21
Very practical.  Congratulations.

Thanks Gary.  I got a little over 2 months and $3,000 in the T600.  After a week and half of ground testing and calibrations, that maiden flight was quite nerve-wracking.  It was quite satisfying to see it lift off smooth and level that first time.

Unlike the DJI products, the ArduPilot system does not have dependency on an app for flying fully autonomous missions or getting telemetry data during flight.  The visibility of smart phone or tablet screens in the sunlight is horrible, and they're just about unusable.  With the T600 I don't need any of that.  It can be programmed at the hanger to fly an autonomous mission, take it out to the field, lift off in manual (Stabilize) flight mode, flip the channel 5 switch on the transmitter to Auto and it takes off and flies the flight with no app required to do it.  And it's nice to be able to watch the flight on a bright FPV monitor, with telemetry, that you can actually see in sunlight.  And with zero latency so if you need to take manual control of the aircraft it can be flown via FPV in real time, and you know that what you're seeing on the screen didn't happen 2 or 3 seconds ago while digital signals were being processed.

I've flown Phantoms for a long time, but I eventually reached the conclusion that the consumer-grade FCC Part 15 stuff just wasn't up to par for what I needed.  With a Phantom, if you're a mile or more out and lose GPS you're pretty much screwed to safely bring that aircraft back with the latency in the data transmission.  You can't see roll or pitch in the video feed, nor do you have an artificial horizon on your FPV feed.  All you can do is give it full throttle and get some altitude and get out of there and hope you get GPS back (and hope you still got R/C signal).  Having two cameras onboard - one for the actual photography or video work on a gimbal - and the other locked to the attitude of the aircraft so you can instantly take manual control and fly it from 2 miles or more downrange is pretty important.  All this electronic wizardry doesn't always work, and when it don't it's up to the pilot to bring that aircraft safely home.  You can never rely on GPS and autopilots to do it, and that's one of the downfalls of the consumer-grade UAV's flying with an app on a smart device that you can't even hardly see in sunlight.

We've got a couple of turbine converted spray planes here, and at least one radial left.  One sprays the field right next to my house.  I'm always on the watch/listen for them when I fly.  They've been pretty active the last couple of weeks, but I'm not sure they are going to hit these fields this year.  Crops are rotated.

AG0N-Gary Posted at 2016-8-10 12:16
We've got a couple of turbine converted spray planes here, and at least one radial left.  One sprays ...

Turbines have pretty much taken over for aerial application in agriculture.  Piston engines are high maintenance due to elevated cylinder head and oil temp at what amounts to almost 100% WOT operation at low altitude.  And, of course, power to weight ratio as well.  A Pratt & Whitney Canada PT-6A @ 1,300 hp is about half the weight of a comparable piston engine.  And the PT-6 will run 4,000 hours to hot section inspection and 8,000 hours to overhaul, where the piston engine will need to be topped at 1,000 and major overhaul at 2,000.

I think the turbine power to weight ratio is the neatest part, and the decreased maintenance schedule is a plus.  The big radial has really been active this last week not far from me.  Some day, I would like to run down and talk to them and see if they would be interested in allowing me to parallel them low on a pass or two at the fence line when they are in this neighborhood.  I doubt it, but I can take a no.  They come within about 75 feet of my house when they do the field north or south of me.  He does a pullup and turn to clear my trees and radio tower (65') in the yard.  We had a guy that sprayed under the guy wires of the 1500 foot tower where I worked at one time.