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Another fun day at Santa Pod

Spent the day at Old Warden near Biggleswade Beds, good fun watching the planes, especially the old bipes struggling with the strong and very gusty winds!!

My first mini show of the season, and I think I spent more time looking at the planes then the minis…

Did buy a nice new set of lamps, halogen of course! Might be able to see where I’m going.

Went to the London Festival Of Railway Modeling today, mainly to look at various DCC products, and possibly buy a booster to speed up development of my controller.

On the DCC front, lets just say I wasn’t impressed. The items on sale were under featured, many had user interfaces much like an early 80s pocket calculator, not good at all. There was a couple that had nice interfaces but they were up around the £400 mark, ouch.

On to the booster, the cheapest was around £150 for a 4A unit, way too much, there was an 8A for £250 too. Considering the modern N gauge locos draw somewhere around 50mA-100mA theres no way i was pay that much, just to help development.

In the end I spotted a Hornby Select for £60 which has a built in booster capable or just under 1A, with a bit of modding (15v -> 12v and bring out the logic level DCC rails) it’s woking a treat! yay.

I’ll also be adding a video of some of the layouts to this post at some point.

Well, the weather wasn’t anywhere near as hot as Wings n Wheels, a nice breeze and a bit of could made it quite nice out in the open.
There were far less minis this year, but it was still a pretty well packed show.

Came away from this one with a face like a beetroot and forearms to match… Can definitely tell our 2 days of summer have arrived.
Lots of model flying, from small EDF powered foamy commercial jets, through 18 foot span electric models to 600cc 60% scale aerobats. Boats in the boat pool and this year an indoor (tent) 1:18th scale car track which only had a small aperture at the end for viewing, so if there was anything to see you couldn’t get near it…

The first VCF in the UK, lots of old kit to play with, and lots of friendly geeks! A good day out.

And a quick video, no plot, just some random clips.

Lots of cars to look at at Beaulieu, sun was shining so the drive down was quite good too. Driving through the new forrest was fun, horses just off the side of the road with no fences, not too surprisingly there were lots of skid marks…

This year I tagged along on some of the London to Brighton mini run. Joining the run route at the M23 I saw 20 or so minis along the way.

Not having tickets we couldn’t park on the front, so left the car at a car park just down the road and walked to the show. By the time we got there, about 10am, the show was already well populated making it hard to get through to see the stands, but it was certainly no worse than most shows I’ve been to.

We left at around 2pm, leaving Madeira Drive still filling with a constant stream minis…

A 100 mile trip each way, well worth it, lots to see, club stands, venders along with live flying and driving. Even more than last year!