Drone fora

Bacchus · Oct 9, 2023

I'm starting to get interested in drones from a neighborhood tactical perspective. Does anyone know of a good and active drone (quadcopter) forum? Not necessarily tactical, just informative from a consumer standpoint. I looked at a few and they were ghost towns. Lots of threads but no replies.

My plan is to start dirt cheap (< $50); and if I'm still interested get something low end of midrange ( $100 - $250); and if I'm still interested I might go high end of midrange (> $400).

I get it that < $50 won't be much more than a toy, but I can learn some basics and decide if I want to go bigger. Even at that price I can cruise the neighborhood and transmit video.

kmk1012 · Oct 10, 2023

I don't have any idea about other forums anywhere but I do dabble a little bit in drones. I ended up with a DJY Mini II and am very happy with it. Like you, I started out with a Costco special and quickly outgrew it.

Bacchus · Oct 10, 2023

DJI drones seem to be the big name these days at their price points. Like you, I expect to eventually end up with a DJI if I stick with it. Good choice!

Yikes! DJI makes some much more expensive ($16,000) drones also:

DJI professional grade drones

Costco is a big store, I wonder if they would get peevish if I flew a drone around inside. It might make it a lot easier to find things.

I could even find my wife! I get scared when we get separated in a store, when she's running around unsupervised with a credit card. She's not as bad as me with a card, though!

Bacchus · Oct 12, 2023

Digging in a little deeper, I'm astonished at how much more capability a $500 or $700 drone has over a $50 to $150 drone. For a rough example:

drone: HS440 HS720 DJI Mini 3
cost: $70. $170. $469
Range: 100m 500m. 25,000m
Altitude: 30m 120m. 4,000m
Duration: 20 min. 20 min. 51 min

The cameras are much better on the more expensive drones, and with FPV (first person view) on the more expensive drones you get goggles to view the camera feed instead of having to look at your cell phone. I would think the cell phone view would be tough in bright light. The more expensive also appear to be twice as fast. 25,000 meters is about 15.5 miles (!).

Night and day. A totally different world. The Mini 3 might be nearly 3X the HS720, but well worth it if you can use the extra range, altitude, duration, video quality, etc, because the performance difference is much more than 3X.

kmk1012 · Oct 12, 2023

Bacchus said:
Digging in a little deeper, I'm astonished at how much more capability a $500 or $700 drone has over a $50 to $150 drone. For a rough example:

drone: HS440 HS720 DJI Mini 3
cost: $70. $170. $469
Range: 100m 500m. 25,000m
Altitude: 30m 120m. 4,000m
Duration: 20 min. 20 min. 51 min

The cameras are much better on the more expensive drones, and with FPV (first person view) on the more expensive drones you get goggles to view the camera feed instead of having to look at your cell phone. I would think the cell phone view would be tough in bright light. The more expensive also appear to be twice as fast. 25,000 meters is about 15.5 miles (!).

Night and day. A totally different world. The Mini 3 might be nearly 3X the HS720, but well worth it if you can use the extra range, altitude, duration, video quality, etc, because the performance difference is much more than 3X.

I'll second that, my DJI Mini II has a 6 mile range. I "may" have tested that and it is totally true. Legally a person needs to have line of sight but, oops. I flew it to the far side of town from my place and I don't even live in town. When I got to where I felt tot was time to come home, I hit the auto return button, set the remote down and grabbed a beer. It flew back and landed itself exactly where it took off from. Just don't try the auto lane off of a boat, almost found out the hard way that even anchored up, the boat still drifts and that sucker will land where it took off from.

JRMadrid · Oct 12, 2023

I fly a DJI Mini 3 as a hobby.

Fun.

L84Cabo · Oct 12, 2023

Somebody has to have a full blown security drone out at this point...don't they?

Something that can fly a pre planned route over your property at a set time/interval and alert you if anything looks amiss? Something with both infrared and night vision? Cause that would be kinda cool. But I'm sure it's expensive if something like that does exist.

Bacchus · Oct 13, 2023

I think you can do preplanned routes with 'waypoint' functionality, but of the dozen drones I've looked at (most expensive was $759) the Mini 3 had the longest flight duration, and it is only 51 minutes. All the < $200 drones I looked at fly less than 30 minutes, closer to 20.

Maybe if it could land and connect to a charger and then resume. However, the recharge time is a couple hours on the drones I've looked at, sometimes much longer. I guess you could have a fleet of drones so that one is in the air at all times while the others are getting recharged.

Robot mowers and robot vacuum sweepers can automatically locate their charging stations and recharge, I believe. I don't have either.

I don't think the waypoints include vertical movements, but maybe.