KAP

My KAP rig showed up from Brooks Leffler. I'm pleased as punch. It's a well-made kit, very flexible, adaptable to lots of different cameras, and the aluminum sheet metal is all anodized a nice black. (I can't do anodizing in my shop at the moment, so this is a really nice touch that lets me know I made the right choice in buying the kit from Brooks rather than rolling my own.)

I've got my radio, receiver, servos, etc. sitting at home ready to go. I can't wait!

In addition to the KAP kit I picked up 30' of fuzzy tail. My big lifter kite (a parafoil) has a nasty habit of flying straight as an arrow, then rotating 180 degrees and flying straight as an arrow... straight down... Most of the time it'll pull another 180 about ten feet off the ground, but sometimes it just plows straight on in. And since the KAP rig is typically suspended 100' under the kite, it doesn't matter if it turns or not. The camera would've done a lawn-dart before it ever turned around. So I hope the fuzzy tail fixes this and keeps it nose to the wind and ass to the ground. (If this seems crass, try losing a few payloads and then tell me I'm being crass.)

Sorry, no pictures to share just yet. The thing just got here, for crying out loud!

The real drag in all this? I've been having this mysterious weakness and shortness of breath recently. Its cropped up in the last four months or so... ever since I had bronchitis and what the ER doc thought was the early stages of pneumonia. So not so mysterious after all. In any case I'm back on antibiotics, inhaled corticosteroids, I've got a LABA inhaler, the whole nine yards. And I'm stuck at sea level for the next week (no remote worksite for me). All of this means my chances of kite flying this weekend are nil, zilch, nada, zero. Gotta love it. I can build the KAP rig, but can't use it. Ah well. Such is life. It's incentive to get better.

The bigger drag? This may be permanent. I might have asthma.

As I tell my kids when they're looking for a four-letter word of their own: Poopy!!

Can't wait 'till I'm well enough to go outside to play.

Tom