Had a successful checkout flight of the on-board FPV equipment:
1) 2014 1.9m Skywalker (very much already a crash veteran even at a tender age of 2 months)
2) ImmersionRC EzUHF with diversity for the R/C
3) 700TVL sony ccd camera
4) 2w VTX mounted on the tail boom just before the tail assembly
5) APM2.6 (with 2.78b firmware) and minimOSD for the auto-pilot and OSD respectively
6) 80A Hobbywing ESC (previous 60A ESC was damaged after a crash)
7) 4S 5000mah battery
A week before, during a first test, I had an issue with the GPS and experienced TBE’s during loiter and auto modes.. turns out the external GPS was being affected by the APM power supply.. moved the UBlox GPS and APM to another location (in the compartment under the wing) and the problem just disappeared.
The day before this test, I upgraded to the APM 2.78 firmware which unfortunately had a bug rendering one of the servos params to be uneditable..a big problem for me since my Ailerons needs to be reversed with the auto-pilot is engaged. Fortunately 24 hours after releasing the software, the developers released a patch 2.78b which solved the problem.
The auto mode in particular is pretty good, as there was a 23kph crosswind. The APM was able to compensate for the wind and made automatic adjustments in the final approach landing the plane a few meters from the target. Though in the future, when setting waypoints, one has to give allowance for the typical crosswind direction of a known field and set the waypoints several meters opposite the wind direction.