The Team from left to right are: Alice Bjursell, Simeon O'Neill, Aaron Donaldson, Sarah Pike.

Team Telemaster ventured into UAVs after resurecting two thirty year old Senior Telemaster (ST) airfames (built by my Dad) and using them for First Person View (FPV) flying with an onboard camera and transmitter.

We decided on the ST airframe for a number of reasons. Stability, ease of repair, simple design, lift a huge amount of payload, and we had two of them already sitting in the shed.

The Senior Telemaster is a great airframe. As you can see from the video ours are 30 years old and still going strong. (and they aren't like Grandfathers Axe either.... five different handles and four new heads but he's had the same axe for 30 years

They can lift a HUGE amount of weight without a great penalty. The Missouri S&T team ( In the UAV Outback Challenge) had their Telemaster (with four stroke motor and two litres of fuel) flying at 22 pounds (10 Kilograms) Ours was more like six - seven kilograms. You need to remember that the horizontal stab is a flying surface too, and a big one at that.

Motor is a Hyperion Z-5025-20 swinging a 17x10 APC-E prop running through a HYPERION TITAN 90A HV HI-PRO BRUSHLESS ESC OPTO. Batteries are 2 x 5s Hyperion HP-LCX5350 5350mAh in series to give 37 volts. Max AMPs with that combo was about 47 and in cruise is 6-8 amps so most flight times have been around the 50 minute mark. If you like thermalling you can extend the flight time too
Our plan for the competition was to fly the search section clean (No water bottle, 600grams) and then when we found Outback Joe, return to base and swap batteries and put on the water bottle that needed to be dropped. Fly directly back to that point, drop bottle then return.

Servos are powered from a separate 2cell lipo running through a 6v regulator.
Video transmitter, camera and modem powered by another 3cell lipo.
Safety system another 2 cell lipo.
Autopilot powered by a 4 cell NiMh.
Onscreen display powered by a small 2cell lipo.

So including the flight batteries...... seven batteries on board

Any more questions, feel free to ask.

Cheers
Aaron