On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 05:13:49PM -0700, Martin Usher wrote: > > On another topic, has anyone ever had glitch problems from power > > lines? (Mark Mech / Aerofoam) > > In the current edition of "Smithsonian" there is a two page color photograph > of an outdoor art piece made by sticking about a thousand flourescent tubes > vertically into the ground under some high tension wires. The photograph is > taken at dusk and the tubes are all glowing.
This would be Richard Box's work, http://www.richardbox.com/ . Click on the main graphic or the archive link to see the other cool bits he's done. > This is an extreme example but it illustrates the significant electrical > fields that high voltage transmission lines give off. It will affect a radio > receiver, possibly enough to make it glitch. The question I can't answer is > how much is enough -- how close can you go to what lines without > experiencing problems. The art piece was done under 400kV lines; I don't > think anyone's going to be flying near those, but what about lower voltage > lines? Remember that a Red Herring isn't quite big or conductive enough to do too much damage, but I've successfully flown underneath / in between these lines for an hour or so with only one or two glitches out of a GWS 4 channel single conversion receiver: http://www.diff.net/media/2002_07_10_Oregon_trip/img_5872-medium.html I'm not sure if I'm comfortable saying this in a public forum, but the plane mostly glitches when you whack the lines (remember, with 4.5 ounces of white foam.) The lines were about 5' above my max launch, so I didn't spend too much time up that high. I do not know the voltage of those lines, but it's line 1, mile 18, tower 2 in Hillsboro, OR, if anybody wants to look it up :) > We have neighborhood distribution lines running down one side of our field > and they don't affect our flying (assuming that nobody actually lands on > them, that is). I don't know what voltage they are, I think its 7kV. If they > were significantly higher voltage then the poles they are on would be a lot > taller and we'd be avoiding them just like any other obstacle. So people have demonstrated solar powered planes from the sun and from spotlights (NASA Dryden), as well as from lasers. Has anybody done to math to see whether an inductively powered plane could be flown under high lines? There are several technical challenges I can think of, but it would be a neat way to get the power companies to absolutely hate you... -Peter (Please, take all "homeland security" discussions off-list; this is about interference and overload in receivers when flying in the vicinity but not through power lines.) -- Peter Jensen ... http://www.diff.net/peter ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off.
