We posted a review of sorts based on our experience with the Cinestar 8 on our website. Here is the link. If you have any questions or feedback, fire away and I'll do my best to respond. Hope you all have a prosperous 2013! all the best, Ben
Hello Ben, Thanks for the post, 1300 flights is quite an accomplishment in any timeframe! Greetings, Adam
Thanks, Adam. We like to fly! On one half day shoot we did 50 flights from the bow of a boat: We hope to do more reviews in the future if this one proves to be helpful to folks. all the best, Ben
Ben, I love your work. When you say 50 flights, about how much flight time does that represent, and how many batteries do you carry with you? And given all that flying over water, what are you using to retrieve telemetry for battery levels? Thanks so much for posting this!
Every time we take off, we count that as a flight. Glad you enjoy our work. We've been using the MaxAmps batteries with our CS8 - they're 11,000mah. We bring 6 of those with us. We also have a few random batteries too. We've just started testing some Gens Ace batteries for comparison. We don't use telemetry. We have a Lipo alarm on the battery that is really loud and set conservatively, especially over water. We also have a timer with alarm on our remote. We know how much power we burn with a given payload, and we set the timer on our radio accordingly. We don't run our batteries down past 3.7V a cell. The alarm on our radio is triggered when the throttle stick is raised beyond 10% and reset by a switch on the radio. Hope that helps!
Ben, that's great info. What kind of effective life are you planning for on these batteries? By that I mean when do you plan to retire them? My reading on this matter seems to indicate that the high-power LiPo packs do not last forever. I'm curious how one should benchmark them so that there are no surprises.
We've had to retire a few. You'll notice that the run time starts to get lower and they won't take as much charge back. Here's a good article that goes into great detail: http://www.rchelicopterfun.com/rc-lipo-batteries.html