Flyswamper

He needed me to drop in and give him an emergency stuff sack for his wing, but my flying buddy this morning was able to drive his trike back to the LZ and essentially recover himself after a motor-out. Well done on picking/hitting a nice emergency landing spot and getting back! We still don't know what the cause of the motor out was though!

Just some footage from a flight the other day with me rambling on about why I don't do many water footdrags anymore (too much pitting damage on my propellors) and a few random observations along the way!

I needed to replace the bearings inside the main pulley/hub on my Moster 185 plus. I already had an eccentric shaft with bearings pre-installed sitting in my spare parts bin. It was late evening and I wanted to fly the next morning, so I hurried through an attempted repair but ended up damaging my prop hub due to carelessness and impatience. Hopefully sharing is caring.... The sad thing is I'm pretty sure I pulled this same stunt a few years ago. I had a vague memory that told me I needed to be relatively gentle with it, but I was in a hurry and thought I was being more gentle this time..... I wasn't... :) Enjoy

This weekend I went with a couple of my paramotoring buddies and we attended a reserve parachute clinic that was put on by the local hanggliding community. I think all three of us thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and felt like it was well worth our time. I captured a bit of footage and thought I'd share it here. I open the video with a brief clip from a few years ago when I tried to test a throw on my own and got a bit of a surprise. As you can tell by what happens, I'm the last guy you'd want to get reserve advice from but hopefully sharing this stuff from my perspective can help us all in the long run. Take care, fly safe, and have fun~

I fly a paramotor and sometimes carry a handheld avaiation radio with me. This is a bit of a learning experience for me but I'm playing with building a DIY dipole antenna and tuning it with some relatively inexpensive diagnostic RF gear. This video documents some of those efforts. Almost all the credit for how to do this goes to the "bonafide pirate" youtube channel and his video here: https://youtu.be/uWwZKY827lU • DIY VSWR Meter fo... I already owned a software defined radio from RTL, so I don't have a link to the one I ordered since I've had it several years, but here is a link to one pretty much the same I think/hope: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-d... there is driver and software setup associated with this and I would just refer you to the rtl-sdr.com website for all of that. The signal generator came from here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078J57BJB?... The RF bridge I got was this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CDBHXNB?... The bridge is non-functional as delivered. I had to do a little soldering to get mine to work. I made a video on it, but a MUCH MUCH better video explaining how it works and what to fix is here: https://youtu.be/1tsY7KmoD40 spektrum software: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/spektrum-new-... See the links in bonafide pirates video for other useful info too... Many/most of the links I'm giving are either directly from what he had or whatever I could find current-day that was the closest equivalent. The coax cable I cut into to make the dipole antenna (it made 2 by cutting in the middle) is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SYM34RH?... If you can, I would recommend using the affiliagte links that bonafide pirate has on his video for ordering this stuff so that maybe he benefits from your order (I don't have any such thing setup). 50ohm dummy load: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BXV6RW1?... bought these SMA-BNC adapters: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T8LMHHQ?... You might want a few of these:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BRHRVC4?... and maybe some SMA adapters: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Z2QB9M8?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

I managed to get out to do a little flying at the 2022 Firelake Balloon festival. I was first one in the air this morning and conditions were really nice/calm on the surface but only a couple hundred feet in the air we had ~20mph winds. So the gradient was noticeable making it a bit bumpy and also making it where you didn't want to go downwind much. So.... I put in a short ~1/2 hour flight and then landed and took some footage of the other local flyers that came out this morning. Thanks to everyone for letting a visiting paramotor pilot (me) join you guys!

May 2021 highlights of flights with the Katy Wingnuts

Paramotor flight through the cotton fields

September 2019 Katy Wingnuts Highlights of Paramotor flying