UnBelizeable!

Ok, so I couldn't help it, I had to put that title. Anyway, I have tons of great pictures from Belize, so I'm going to try to let the do the talking. To get things started, here is a picture of our home for 8 days while there:

It could have been worse...

I'm not a very good photographer, it's just the most photogenic place on earth.

I tagged along with the coral reef ecology class to Lighthouse Reef Atoll. The atoll is about 75 km off the coast of mainland Belize and is home to some of the best coral reefs and stands of mangrove in the western hemisphere. I went to finish what I started last year: map all the islands. I came armed with the DAO, all of the long-range radio gear, lots of spare parts, and Matt and Nella.

Our plan was simple: fly from Northern Caye to map it and Sanbore Caye on one day, then fly from long Caye to map it and Half Moon Caye on another day. We made the Northern flights first.

We flew from an abandoned 2000' airstrip there and made 4 flights. We flew half of Northern in the first flight. The second flight was aborted due to overheating issues. I had moved all the electronics inside the fuselage to improve resistance to a possible water landing but I had not forseen the heat issues. I moved the ESC back outside the fuselage in the field and got back in the air to fly the other half of Northern. After completing the imaging of Northern we turned our attention to the 3km flight out to Sanbore and back. This flight was over open water and was, by all accounts, risky. Regardless, we made it happen. All went well with the flight but, unfortunately, the battery in the imaging camera died just as the plane made it to Sanbore. We now have 4 batteries for that camera... In all, all flights from Northern were pretty uneventful and we got an incredible mosaic of the caye.

Preparing to fly

Under the hood

A couple days later we flew from Long Caye. Flying here was much, much more difficult. Instead of a 2000' airstrip and no wind, we had a pier and a 20x10m beach and 25 km/h sustained winds. We elected to take off from the pier as it was oriented directly into the wind and provided a good open departure path. I elected to land on the beach, as the 20m side was oriented parallel to the wind, making it the biggest open spot on the island which matched up with the wind. We made 3 flights here, 2 over Long and 1 out to Half Moon. All the flights were entirely uneventful save for a few telemetry and RC connectivity issues at the extreme ranges of our flights (~6km). Landing was the only difficult part. As discussed in my crash post, the second landing did not go well. The first was hard, as I came in fairly slow and when I descended below the treetops I lost the headwind, causing the plane to stall about 1m above the beach. No damage was done. The second flight ended in a minor crash discussed int he other post. The third landing was absolutely flawless but, unfortunately, the RC system lost link when the plane got on the ground causing it to failsafe and accelerate into a tree. Damage was minimal from that.

Despite good time in air, the imagery from Long was not all that good. We identified a major flaw in our imaging system. Our camera's CHDK script causes it to take a picture every 2 seconds while the camera gets a signal over USB and, when that signal is cut, it powers off the camera. Once the camera powers off there is no way to restart it in the air. We knew this but what we did not know is that our RC failsafes were set up to turn off the RC channel controlling the camera. This meant that when we got our first intermittent failsafe on our second flight over Long and our flight to Half Moon, the camera cut off. We ended up having excellent imagery of about 2/3 of Long Caye and none of Half Moon Caye because of this. We now have a 16mm prime lens for the Sony NEX-5 and will be using it in the plane now. Because the NEX uses an IR trigger this will no longer be a problem; we will be able to toggle between capturing images and not while in flight.

Ready to fly at Long

Runway, Long Caye style

Under the hood at Long

Long Caye GCS

In all, it was a great trip that got us a lot of great data and taught us a lot. We made some mistakes that now we don't ever have to make again (it is just unfortunate we made them there...). Anyways, check out the links below for some data products and more.

Northern Caye Image Mosaic
WFU News
CEES News