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Here are some pictures from my motorcycle while racing at St. Louis International Raceway in Fairmont, Illinois.  To see video of this go to the video page.

This was done in 1986, 1987 and 1988.  I removed the headlight, speedometer and stuff.  The camera was mounted where the headlight was and it actually looked out through a hole I cut in my number plate.  The camera was an RCA CMOS imager. About 2 kg mass and was twice the size of a modern camcorder. The transmitter was mounted where the speedometer and stuff was.  Then I ran the coaxial cable for the antenna up my sleeve, up my back to the antenna on my helmet.  The receiver, tv, vcr and the receiver antenna were mounted on the scoring building along the front straight.  You can see interference from the ignition system of other bikes in the picture at the top right as those bikes would get near the receiver and I was far away.

The fairing is hinged forward and down onto the front fender. (This was for quick headlight removal to go from street legal to racing bike... a nice stock feature from Yamaha.)  I have removed all the instruments and headlight to make room for the tv camera (in the box with the round holes) and the transmitter in the box above it.  Please keep in mind that this was 1986 and the camera weighed 3 pounds. There was no such thing as "image stabilization" back then.  All of these pictures from Saint Louis International Raceway in Fairmont, Illinois.
   I do all of my video hosting and send my video email and video brodcasting with Helloworld.

Much of the problems with the picture are due to the fact that the people who design cameras think all users are morons. I had to search for months to find a camera that did NOT have autofocus. This camera had, like all others, dang auto-iris.  So the camera would adjust the overall video level to some undesired level because of the sky in the picture.  So this really made the video suck big time in the morning and the evening when the sun was low. If you ever try this be sure you get a camera with manual focus, manual "exposure", manual color compensation and everything.  These all came out with green sky due to the auto color compensation.  I put a layer of lexan faceshield material in front of the camera to protect it from stuff on the track and bugs (hey, I was going 122 mph on the front straight).   The auto color compensation circuit then screws everything up due to the faceshield that looks perfectly clear to us but is not perfectly clear to the sensor in the camera that adjusts color.  (The lesson here, learned too late, is to only cover the lens of the camera and do NOT cover the color compensation sensor on the front.  You can see in the r.c. airplane pictures below that the sky IS blue because I did not have the faceshield material in front of the camera for that adventure.)

And here are some pictures from the radio controlled airplane.  This plane was built by KB9QAB and I did the electronics work.  Video from this adventure is on my videos site www.helloworld.com/alandewey 

This is a shot above the Engineering Buildings and campus lake at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

The assembly hall building and parking lots

These shots came out pretty decent.  These adventures were done in 1989 and 1990 when I quit my job I hated so much at Central Illinois Public Service Company and went to graduate school for a M.S. in Manufacturing Systems.  That's why these shots are of the S.I.U. campus. If this camera had autofocus like most do, this would have been hopeless.  The camera is looking right through the propellor.  The autofocus circuit would have focused on the propellor and we would see nothing.  Use a fixed focus camera and just set it at "infinity". Also NEVER attempt to do this with an old tube type imager. It will NEVER withstand the vibration.

If you want the technical information on how I did this I will gladly help you out.  

go to wb9jtk home page last update 2006-11-26