… And Why I Didn’t Go Fishing The Next Day

Yesterday was my birthday, and my wife gave me a cheap little import drone for my Birthday. More on Drones later.

I had a nice leisurely breakfast, and probably one to many cups of coffee. Then I maneuvered trailers around in the yard to make more room for my son’s BAJA SAE race team to create more challenging practice tracks. I’ve got more safety cones arriving Monday, and I’ve been looking for a cheap source for about 50 straw bales. Best I’ve found so far is alfalfa bales, but that source won’t be cutting for about 2-3 weeks.

I moved one of the kids old mini rails around and fired it up on starting fluid, and checked to see if the tires would hold air. I figured if I can get it running again one of them can use it to be a rolling obstacle on the track to practice safe passing. I’m also considering stage one kit on that little Robin so it will be faster than the expect. It starts on starting fluid, but the centrifugal clutch seems to be stuck. I imagine a hammer and penetrating oil will get it going.

Then I sat down and took the 30 minute course and test to get my recreational drone operators certificate.  Did you know there is now no legal way to fly a drone (including any RC aircraft) in the USA no matter how small without one, and the recreational certificate isn’t valid if you commercialize it IN ANYWAY.  Not even uploading videos to social media if the channel is monetize, if the video has sponsors, or it promotes a business.  To upload videos to your, in anyway monetized, social media you must have a Part 107 commercial drone operators license.  A much more comprehensive test, $175 every two years and I think all drones have to be individually registered for an additional fee per drone.  After acing the simple test (free) and printing out my certificate I started looking to see if I can even fly it around my property.

I’m within the five mile controlled airspace of an airport.  There is an app which accesses another app I can use after registration to request to fly in controlled airspace.  Amazingly I can get instant approval (supposedly) from the FAA to fly with a hard ceiling of 100 ft above ground level.  Once you get approval they notify ATC that there are drones flying in the area.  Of course, if everybody follows the rules it doesn’t matter.  I fought with it for a while and didn’t get it to work, so I set it aside for a while.  As I was headed in from the shop to get a soda two Osprey’s buzzed my house.  They were well above the 500 ft minimum they are supposed to maintain, but they might have only been at about 1000.  If I had been flying their down force would have probably wrecked my drone.  Anyway, I am now a certificated recreational drone pilot, and I can fly around the house with a 100ft hard ceiling if I get airspace approval first and don’t use the drone for anything actually useful.  Eventually I’ll probably go ahead and get my commercial license, but not until I have some skills.  It took half a day, but I did get all the batteries charged.

I finally got some new seats for the ProCraft. They arrived yesterday, and I set them in place to see what they will look like.

Then knowing some strange kids (young men and women) might be wrenching in my backyard I installed a hose reel inside the back door with 100′ of 3/8 hose. I’ve been wanting to do that anyway.  It will make moving trailers easier if nothing else.  Also, I will no longer have an excuse for hoses laying all over the place on the back apron.  It was a bit of a hack job, but its solid.  I need to change my air tap from a street 45 to a street 90 out of the manifold for safer clearance behind the reel, but Amazon will deliver some street 90s tomorrow.

Finally I headed into the house, or rather my wife came out to the shop to get me.  I wasn’t feeling need for alcohol so I had some tea instead.  My wife had picked up some hot wings and a carrot cake for my birthday, and a much fancier drone with its own first person video display built into the remote instead of having to link my cell phone for video.  I’ haven’t taken that one out of the box yet.

This morning I finally figured out how to get an FAA approval to fly and it worked.  Then I cancelled my approval because I have work to do.