as I was mowing the other day I noticed some dead grass. Upon further inspection I found it was in a rectangle shape...I then found two more such shapes. Our house was built in 66 so I haven`t been to excited about hunting as I have only found new stuff but on the east side I have now found three old foundations that without the drought I would have never known they were there .Kind of like your septic tank does all the grass dies right over it first. With this in mind I drove around town (pop. 1,065 so it didn`t take to long ) and saw several more such old foundations being revealed by the drought. Nothing good so far but I have found some old junk..lol.. so I am being optimistic about what I might find in that part of the yard.
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drought good for something...maybe
- Thread starter tometusns
- Start date
bootyhoundpa
Well-known member
i know sometimes shallowly buried outhouse foundations will leave those discolered square or round shapes in the grass ....
Critterhunter
New member
Very cool idea. Never heard that trick. I have heard of people seeing foundation outlines by frost on the ground before. The foundation blocks or stones would hold the heat longer than the surrounding dirt, so when there is an early morning frost you could see the areas where frost didn't form on the grass showing the outline of the foundation.
I've got some pictures below I think you guys might find interesting on spotting old signs of foundations/trails/old roads/etc. And no it's not google earth. This is better! And you can always get the view your looking for right up to date on that day with the change of seasons you want for no leaves on the trees and such to see into the canopy easier, or in the spring for say spotting apple trees in bloom in the woods which is often a sign of an old homestead long since gone.
A way I've been messing around with here and there (not much lately though) is kind of along the same lines of what your are talking about. I design and build my own electric RC aircraft using high performance brushless motors and lipos, so depending on the design and wing loading I can lift some pretty hefty payloads into the air on certain planes. One plane I designed specifically for housing my digital pocket camcorder/camera. I can either do still shots triggered remotely by my remote control plane transmitter control, or I can also do live video recording along with live video feed to the ground so I can watch the view as if I were the pilot and also what I'm filming or taking pictures of.
This bird's eye view can reveal details and clues to old activity in the area that would be very hard if not impossible to notice from on the ground. Old roads or trails that the forest canopy shows you slight evidence of, old foundations that just have very slight elevations or depressions to outline them compared to the surrounding ground, and so on. It's also a handy way to scout from a bird's eye view to see if any private land might be worth asking permission to hunt on if you can see some old structures off in the distance that would be impossible to see from the ground due to trees or other obstacles. Once you find something that looks worthy of hunting it motivates you to knock on a door and ask permission, and since you've probably found something nobody else would have ever seen from the road chances are it's never been detected before.
A friend has taken the video fly by wire to the next step. He's gone onto what they call FPV (First Person View). He built goggles with LCD screens in them so that he sees with his eyes and has the experience of actually being the pilot in the plane. He can turn his head left or right and the camera on the plane will pan in that direction just like you are looking out the window! Very cool stuff. I could do that but the only problem is if you should lose your video feed and need to remove the goggles to find the plane, it's very hard to find an RC plane in the air once you've taken your eyes off it from experience talking. And also, often he flies his plane so far off in the distance that you could never see it by the naked eye anyway should there be a video feed problem. I prefer to keep my real eye on the plane at all times and only take small glances at my display screen to see what the plane is seeing to line up shots and such. I can always land the plane and review the recorded video or still shots for any hints of possible metal detecting sites.
I hotwire my planes from construction foam, and then greatly re-enforce things like the wings with carbon tubes or sheet things with balsa for added crash protection. My yellow aerial design below has a bulky body because I wanted my camera well protected in the event of a crash. I can get a good half hour or so of flight time with throttle management. Full throttle mostly about ten to fifteen minutes or so. All depends on how much you gun the electric motor. These brushless motors are very powerful, creating a lot of torque and speed, and very efficient, so using high capacity lipo batteries you can get some very long run times out of them.
The yellow plane is the design I made for my RC video applications, but the red dual boom pusher is another design I really to fly for it's stability as well and it's unique abilities to turn on a dime and get out of a closed in situation, like misjudging the height of a tree in it's path. Thanks to it's large control surfaces such as the horizontal and vertical stabilizers, it's got very good control and stability at even almost walking speeds with little air flow over the control surfaces, and it literally seems like I can pull the nose up on that plane and kick the tail around and it will stop and spin around on a dime in one spot. For it's fantastic manoeuvrability I think it would also make an excellent aerial platform and may build another in similar design for aerial video specifically down the road as well.
Great thing about foam is it is cheap, easy to work with, fast to build with, and you can hot wire out pretty much any design you can think up in your head, along with it being very light, very durable, and it repairs real easy with a little Gorilla Glue. Gorilla Glue will foam into the crevices of the foam and make a really solid repair, and it's light like foam too once dry due to all the trapped air in it.
Anyway, the pics...You can see some of my aerial still shots below over a old farm I had permission to be on. Note the old red barn and the trails through the fields to indicate how old foot trails from eons ago can be very visible from the air but hard to see on the ground too.
The delta wing stealth looking plane is the only one I didn't build the body for. It's my speed demon and will do close to 100mph or so. Scares me to fly sometimes and hard to keep an eye on and figure out orientation at full throttle some times. We custom winded the brushless motor with a friend's own specifications and it really gets up and goes with some very efficient amp draw for how fast it'll go...
I've got some pictures below I think you guys might find interesting on spotting old signs of foundations/trails/old roads/etc. And no it's not google earth. This is better! And you can always get the view your looking for right up to date on that day with the change of seasons you want for no leaves on the trees and such to see into the canopy easier, or in the spring for say spotting apple trees in bloom in the woods which is often a sign of an old homestead long since gone.
A way I've been messing around with here and there (not much lately though) is kind of along the same lines of what your are talking about. I design and build my own electric RC aircraft using high performance brushless motors and lipos, so depending on the design and wing loading I can lift some pretty hefty payloads into the air on certain planes. One plane I designed specifically for housing my digital pocket camcorder/camera. I can either do still shots triggered remotely by my remote control plane transmitter control, or I can also do live video recording along with live video feed to the ground so I can watch the view as if I were the pilot and also what I'm filming or taking pictures of.
This bird's eye view can reveal details and clues to old activity in the area that would be very hard if not impossible to notice from on the ground. Old roads or trails that the forest canopy shows you slight evidence of, old foundations that just have very slight elevations or depressions to outline them compared to the surrounding ground, and so on. It's also a handy way to scout from a bird's eye view to see if any private land might be worth asking permission to hunt on if you can see some old structures off in the distance that would be impossible to see from the ground due to trees or other obstacles. Once you find something that looks worthy of hunting it motivates you to knock on a door and ask permission, and since you've probably found something nobody else would have ever seen from the road chances are it's never been detected before.
A friend has taken the video fly by wire to the next step. He's gone onto what they call FPV (First Person View). He built goggles with LCD screens in them so that he sees with his eyes and has the experience of actually being the pilot in the plane. He can turn his head left or right and the camera on the plane will pan in that direction just like you are looking out the window! Very cool stuff. I could do that but the only problem is if you should lose your video feed and need to remove the goggles to find the plane, it's very hard to find an RC plane in the air once you've taken your eyes off it from experience talking. And also, often he flies his plane so far off in the distance that you could never see it by the naked eye anyway should there be a video feed problem. I prefer to keep my real eye on the plane at all times and only take small glances at my display screen to see what the plane is seeing to line up shots and such. I can always land the plane and review the recorded video or still shots for any hints of possible metal detecting sites.
I hotwire my planes from construction foam, and then greatly re-enforce things like the wings with carbon tubes or sheet things with balsa for added crash protection. My yellow aerial design below has a bulky body because I wanted my camera well protected in the event of a crash. I can get a good half hour or so of flight time with throttle management. Full throttle mostly about ten to fifteen minutes or so. All depends on how much you gun the electric motor. These brushless motors are very powerful, creating a lot of torque and speed, and very efficient, so using high capacity lipo batteries you can get some very long run times out of them.
The yellow plane is the design I made for my RC video applications, but the red dual boom pusher is another design I really to fly for it's stability as well and it's unique abilities to turn on a dime and get out of a closed in situation, like misjudging the height of a tree in it's path. Thanks to it's large control surfaces such as the horizontal and vertical stabilizers, it's got very good control and stability at even almost walking speeds with little air flow over the control surfaces, and it literally seems like I can pull the nose up on that plane and kick the tail around and it will stop and spin around on a dime in one spot. For it's fantastic manoeuvrability I think it would also make an excellent aerial platform and may build another in similar design for aerial video specifically down the road as well.
Great thing about foam is it is cheap, easy to work with, fast to build with, and you can hot wire out pretty much any design you can think up in your head, along with it being very light, very durable, and it repairs real easy with a little Gorilla Glue. Gorilla Glue will foam into the crevices of the foam and make a really solid repair, and it's light like foam too once dry due to all the trapped air in it.
Anyway, the pics...You can see some of my aerial still shots below over a old farm I had permission to be on. Note the old red barn and the trails through the fields to indicate how old foot trails from eons ago can be very visible from the air but hard to see on the ground too.
The delta wing stealth looking plane is the only one I didn't build the body for. It's my speed demon and will do close to 100mph or so. Scares me to fly sometimes and hard to keep an eye on and figure out orientation at full throttle some times. We custom winded the brushless motor with a friend's own specifications and it really gets up and goes with some very efficient amp draw for how fast it'll go...
Critterhunter
New member
Hey, noticed I caught my husky Sky in one of the pictures below back when I took it. Miss that girl...
See the camera viewing port on the side of the AP plane? The camera sits with a slightly down ward pointing angle so it's naturally looking at the ground with just a little bit of the horizon in the picture for perspective on things. That way I don't have to fly with the plane turned sideways to take pictures of the ground.
See the camera viewing port on the side of the AP plane? The camera sits with a slightly down ward pointing angle so it's naturally looking at the ground with just a little bit of the horizon in the picture for perspective on things. That way I don't have to fly with the plane turned sideways to take pictures of the ground.
Critterhunter
New member
Thanks. Yea, it's a fun hobby. I enjoy thinking up designs in my head and building them as much as I do flying them. I can build a plane from scratch with a block of construction foam (get the stuff free when they throw it out at construction sites) in under a week working on it a few hours a day, and that includes all the electronics installed. But I've got a friend who can litterly build and fly a plane in one day. He amazes me, but of course he isn't sinking/hiding the wires and making his look as good. His builds reminds me of rat hotrods. Open fenders, wires everywhere, and no pretty covering, but darn if they don't fly great.
My favorite type of flying is with a motorized glider I built with a 6 foot swingspan. I glassed the foam wing for strength at that kind of length instead of using carbon tubes to stiffen it up. That huge plane will climb straight up vertical with the nose pointed to the sky. My other planes will do that but it's something to see a huge glider do that too. Anyway, reason why it's my favorite is I can turn off the motor and ride thermals with the buzzards. If you catch up drafts off and on you can fly all day without ever turning the motor on again or only using it to run over to the next thermal for more lift. I watch the buzzards to find them, And the neat thing is if you aren't running your motor those buzzards will let you fly right beside them. My friend got them on film sailing beside his planes. It's the most relaxing form of flying and I really enjoy it, as opposed to flying that delta wing which when I land that thing my hands are shaking from how fast it will go.
Best part of building from foam is speed and how cheap (costs me nothing). And the electronics I use I've got cheap sources for. Motors are like $10 usually. Servos $4. ESCs (electronic speed controls) like $8. Receivers like $8. Lipo packs like $10 or so. So building these things is dirt cheap for the most part. Really fun hobby, but frustrating when you take the maiden flight and can't trim the plane out in time before you crash it. That's the hardest part, but once trimmed out your computer transmitter saves the settings for that plane so it's ready to go smoothly for future flights.
Even that delta wing will ride thermals and coast around nice and slow, because flying wings like that generate a ton of lift. Some of my foundest memories are sitting in the middle of a farm field surrounded by woods with nobody to bother me and my friends, as we drinks some beers and just ride thermals all day, seeing who can stay in the air the longest. Even a little betting involved makes it a nice enjoyable day. Nothing more relaxing.
My favorite type of flying is with a motorized glider I built with a 6 foot swingspan. I glassed the foam wing for strength at that kind of length instead of using carbon tubes to stiffen it up. That huge plane will climb straight up vertical with the nose pointed to the sky. My other planes will do that but it's something to see a huge glider do that too. Anyway, reason why it's my favorite is I can turn off the motor and ride thermals with the buzzards. If you catch up drafts off and on you can fly all day without ever turning the motor on again or only using it to run over to the next thermal for more lift. I watch the buzzards to find them,
And the neat thing is if you aren't running your motor those buzzards will let you fly right beside them. My friend got them on film sailing beside his planes. It's the most relaxing form of flying and I really enjoy it, as opposed to flying that delta wing which when I land that thing my hands are shaking from how fast it will go.Best part of building from foam is speed and how cheap (costs me nothing). And the electronics I use I've got cheap sources for. Motors are like $10 usually. Servos $4. ESCs (electronic speed controls) like $8. Receivers like $8. Lipo packs like $10 or so. So building these things is dirt cheap for the most part. Really fun hobby, but frustrating when you take the maiden flight and can't trim the plane out in time before you crash it. That's the hardest part, but once trimmed out your computer transmitter saves the settings for that plane so it's ready to go smoothly for future flights.
Even that delta wing will ride thermals and coast around nice and slow, because flying wings like that generate a ton of lift. Some of my foundest memories are sitting in the middle of a farm field surrounded by woods with nobody to bother me and my friends, as we drinks some beers and just ride thermals all day, seeing who can stay in the air the longest. Even a little betting involved makes it a nice enjoyable day. Nothing more relaxing.
Critterhunter
New member
Tometusns, I think you might like this..
This video I just put up highlights the potential for using RC electric craft to scout out potential old sites of activity for metal detecting, and I freeze the frame for a few seconds and note a few in the video as the plane spots them. Stuff you might not notice on foot standing right on top of it, and stuff that satelite photos also might not show you due to the time of the year. IE: Drought, or say when apple trees are in bloom to indicate possible old homesteads deep in the woods, angled views that reveal things that a flat above view might not, etc...Timing alone can be critical to notice things and RC affords me that. Not to mention it's a boat load of fun and adds to the whole experience of detecting, and is just as relaxing as detecting if I'm flying the right plane that is meant for nice easy/slow flight speeds without getting fussy.
I've finally got around to starting to post some of my RC plane flights on youtube. This video is my first posted so far, although it was made a while back when I was working out the bugs of this prototype design. Things like trim, expotential, distance of the control throws, etc. So it's a bit more jerky at times then it should be. I've built this same basic plane like 3 times thus far, tweaking it here and there. You can see this plane in one of the the pics I already posted above in this thread...
The video freezes for a few seconds here and there to quickly note possible areas of interest to detect, and shows how useful (and fun) it can be combining both hobbies. This was one of my early flights of this plane while I was still working out the expotential, throws, and some trim issues, so it's a bit more jerky at times then later flights. The camera view is looking out the side of the plane at a somewhat downward angle...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0vjN-ilbM8&feature=share&list=PLOEnB0G3pQYShPLm-AsE-arS094hfnMUu
This video I just put up highlights the potential for using RC electric craft to scout out potential old sites of activity for metal detecting, and I freeze the frame for a few seconds and note a few in the video as the plane spots them. Stuff you might not notice on foot standing right on top of it, and stuff that satelite photos also might not show you due to the time of the year. IE: Drought, or say when apple trees are in bloom to indicate possible old homesteads deep in the woods, angled views that reveal things that a flat above view might not, etc...Timing alone can be critical to notice things and RC affords me that. Not to mention it's a boat load of fun and adds to the whole experience of detecting, and is just as relaxing as detecting if I'm flying the right plane that is meant for nice easy/slow flight speeds without getting fussy.
I've finally got around to starting to post some of my RC plane flights on youtube. This video is my first posted so far, although it was made a while back when I was working out the bugs of this prototype design. Things like trim, expotential, distance of the control throws, etc. So it's a bit more jerky at times then it should be. I've built this same basic plane like 3 times thus far, tweaking it here and there. You can see this plane in one of the the pics I already posted above in this thread...
The video freezes for a few seconds here and there to quickly note possible areas of interest to detect, and shows how useful (and fun) it can be combining both hobbies. This was one of my early flights of this plane while I was still working out the expotential, throws, and some trim issues, so it's a bit more jerky at times then later flights. The camera view is looking out the side of the plane at a somewhat downward angle...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0vjN-ilbM8&feature=share&list=PLOEnB0G3pQYShPLm-AsE-arS094hfnMUu
Critterhunter
New member
Just finished editing volume 2 of using RC electric planes to scout for detecting sites with video or high resolution still shots...
http://youtu.be/-hRy3XVrXb8
I can do live ground feeds for "first person view" like I was in the pilot's seat, record onboard or even on the ground for later review, or just take high resolution still shots via activation on my plane transmitter when I want them for better detail on an object of interest.
http://youtu.be/-hRy3XVrXb8
I can do live ground feeds for "first person view" like I was in the pilot's seat, record onboard or even on the ground for later review, or just take high resolution still shots via activation on my plane transmitter when I want them for better detail on an object of interest.