A few months ago Rob gave me his gumstick camera when he upgraded, and since then I've been thinking about recording some flights. These cameras are dirt-cheap (a few dollars on ebäh) and not bad spec-wise, this one records 640x480@30fps onto a microsd card. Lots of variants and they all look like this.

Last weekend I finally tried it out, velcro/rubber-banded to my helmet's chin guard, and the results are quite ok. Primarily I did it for Conny, but others might want to see how paragliding looks like from my perspective (but of course there's lots more interesting pilot videos out there!).

So here are four clips of ridge soaring at Beechmont: the first one is of Saturday's 45min flight in company and very sunny weather, but the camera switched off just before landing. Audio's off in places by a few tenths of a second, too. The bleepy noise somewhat audible over the wind noise is the variometer: excited, high-pitched bleeping means I'm going up, and lower pitch means I'm sinking out.

The other three are of Sunday's shorter flights in overcast and not so pleasant weather, plus quite odd conditions with numerous sinkholes and a bit more bumpiness and turbulence than Saturday. On the other hand these clips all include the launches and landings. On the last flight I almost sank out immediately, the 'ah fuck!' you hear about a minute in was when it looked like I'd keep kicking the trees sledding down towards the bombout - but a bit later I caught some lucky bits of lift and got back up above launch.

The clips are not exactly tiny, so they won't stay on the server forever.

Saturday, 513 megabytes
Sunday #1, 201mb
Sunday #2, 109mb
Sunday #3, 189mb