| For Electric Gliders (and any plane) I won't fly it if I can't visually
| appreciate its beauty in the air.
When you're flying a glider (especially a non-powered one), few things
are more beautiful than getting it so high up that you can barely see
it -- it means that you found some damned good lift!
... of course, to complement that, there's the sense of terror where
you realize that the spot you were flying is actually a bird, or is a
spot on your glasses, or you just don't know where your plane is
anymore.
| So 2000 feet is some thing I would probably never do because the glider
| will be nothing more than a dot (Well, may be bigger than a dot).
I've flown a 2 meter glider at up to 2600 feet. (I know it was that
high because I had a recording altimeter in it.) It was an
irregularly shaped speck -- I could sort of tell which direction is
was pointed in, but not much more than that. I also lost track of it
once or twice, and that's when I decided that it was time to come down
again.)
| I beleive Tx range of 2000-3000 feet should be more than enough for any
| non-pro flyer....
Actually, I doubt the `pros' speck out their gliders as much as us
amateurs do. They may be able to speck them out much better than we
can, but they don't need to as badly as we do.
When finding thermals is hard (because conditions are bad, or you're
unskilled) once you've found one, you don't want to give it up. And
2000 feet of altitude means that you've got 2000 feet of altitude to
use up to find your next thermal -- but 2100 feet would be even
better. But when finding thermals is easy (either because you're
skilled, or conditions are good) you're more likely to go look for
another thermal at only 1000 feet. (And really, even 1000 feet is
pretty high up there.)
Also, it's not all about altitude. When flying a glider, you tend to
look for lift in a large area, with the size of the area increasing as
1) your altitude increases (you always want to be able to bring the
plane back if you can't find lift) and 2) your skill increases (as
better pilots can spot lift from further away, and are more likely to
find lift in any given situation, so they'll push their luck more.)
Once you get away from gliders, I suspect that 99+% of all powered R/C
plane flying is done at less than 700 feet of altitude or so. Sure,
you can go higher, but why? And they don't usually go too far away
horizontally, because there's little benefit to that either.
I'm guessing you made the right decision.
--
Doug McLaren, snipped-for-privacy@frenzy.com
Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he
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