Piz Beverin — 3.4km out, returned

Piz Beverin, south face. 3.4km from the pilot position to the furthest point. 680m altitude gain from the launch site. The ExpressLRS link held the whole time. Returned with RSSI above -90dBm.

The setup: long-range 5” with the 2207/1750kV motors (see previous entry), 500mW ELRS on 868MHz, TrueRC helical on the ground, patch antenna on the quad. This combination has worked reliably up to about 4km in open terrain.

Mountain flying is different from open-field long range. The terrain absorbs signal in ways that flat ground doesn’t. You get multipath reflections from ridges. You lose line-of-sight the moment you drop behind a rock. On this flight, I tracked the ridge line and stayed in visual line-of-sight the whole time — not because I was required to (BVLOS rules in Switzerland are… complex) but because it made the flying better.

The 680m altitude gain took about 6 minutes of climbing. At full throttle you’re pulling 30+ amps and burning through pack fast. I throttled back to 60-65% on the way up, which kept current reasonable and left enough pack for the descent.

Descent: drop the nose, let it run. The quad hits about 120km/h in a dive. The mountains give you something to fly between rather than just flying straight. That’s what makes this terrain worth the hour of driving.

Return: landed with 3.6V/cell resting. Comfortable margin. The only moment of uncertainty was a brief RSSI dip when I flew through a notch in the ridge — signal recovered immediately.

I’ll be back. Probably with the fixed-wing next time, to see what the range actually looks like in this terrain.