This thread has been dead for a bit so I thought I would update. Awhile ago I was flying this little gem in my back yard, got a couple acres to play with, and I was testing out some receivers. Needless to say the receivers were the wrong format and it was a bad decision to fly with so many trees around, over and over. Anyway I had a loss of signal and the plane glided out of the yard, over the trees, across the ravine, and came to rest in a spruce tree. Now I call this the SpruceSmacker and not Shrubsmacker. It did settle at about 50' up in a heavily wooded area on a steep hill. although it was disappointing at the time to lose all those electronics I eventually got over it and moved onto the standard size planes, the Minis were all but forgotten.
Recently in cleaning up the garage I came across a couple of my other Mini planes and in looking at them I now want my electronics back. Being that today is a windy day, to windy for flying, but windy enough to possibly knock a plane out of a tree, i went for a walk in the ravine. Even though it was so long ago that I lost the plane I managed to hone in on the same tree in the woods where i had lost the plane. I looked up and sure enough i saw it, same tree, just a little further down, lodged in the branches. Now the wing is off and hanging on to the fuse by the servo wires straddling the branch.
In a way this is encouraging to retrieve it because it has made progress on it's own to come back home, but in doing so it is now stuck in a worse predicament then it started. I would like to be able to take some long PVC tubing out there and attach them end to end to reach the branches but I don't think I have anything around that would work. I don't own a ladder that size, which would be a nightmare to get in, and if i got it in, almost impossible to get out. I don't own a shotgun either so that's not an option.
Any suggestions would be helpful.