Quadcopters
We don’t call these drones, they are quadcopters, quads for short. FPV stands for First Person View, which is exactly what it sounds like - you have a camera and a video transmitter on the quad, a monitor, or preferably FPV goggles with a video receiver on the ground. It enables you to see the world from the quad’s perspective, which opens up a whole range of possibilities, as you can imagine. This is usually an old-school analog system with low resolution and bad image quality but also very low latency and predictable deterioration when the signal gets weaker.
The one you can see above is my latest one:
- Quad itself:
- Frame: Martian II
- Motors: BrotherHobby R4 2300KV
- Speed controllers (ESCs): Racerstar LiteS 30A
- Flight controller (FC): Betaflight F3
- Radio receiver: FrSky X4R
- FPV Camera: RunCam micro Sparrow 2
- FPV video transmitter (VTX): Eachine TX526
- FPV 5.8 GHz antenna: Some DYS antenna wrapped in heatshrink
- Propellers: Dalprop T5046 (stable, well rounded, durable, little slow but fun), Emax AVAN-R 5065 (the most aggressive props I know, extremely high power draw, they give you a sense of absolute control, amazing handling, snappiness and immediate response to input, really fast and a joy to fly but will destroy your batteries and reduce flight time by 30%), Gemfan 5152 tri-blade (first prop I tried that actually felt different, relatively high speed, nice handling, little heavy, durable to a point)
- Batteries:
- Turnigy Graphene 4S 1300mAh 65C (mine are pretty much dead after ~60 flights. I’ve had 6 in total: destroyed one in a crash, 3 are starting to show signs of dying cells, still flyable but weak in punchouts and aggressive corners and the remaining two are ok)
- Turnigy Multistar 4S 1400mAh 65C (these have lasted quite a bit longer with some clocking in about 150 flights, but they were weaker throughout compared to the Graphenes)
- Just a side note: these things are, in my opinion, holding this hobby back the most. Quads are extremely power hungry and they constantly push batteries way beyond their limits, as a result, you can’t go full throttle for more than a couple of seconds at a time and also the batteries only usually last anywhere from 30 to 100 flights, which makes them probably the most expensive part of this hobby in the long term. You can still fly with old packs, but the performance is noticeably worse.
- Ground equipment:
- Radio controller: FrSky QX7
- FPV goggles: Aomway Commanders
- Charger: ISDT SC-608
- Camera: Xiaomi Yi (original) - the one in the orange case, you wouldn’t want to publish the recorded FPV feed.
One of the first questions people have, after asking about the range, maximum speed, and whether it can spy on you, is how much all this would cost in case they wanted to get into it. I never know how to approach this because if I tell them the amount, It’ll most likely scare them off. It’s not a cheap hobby to get into, that’s for sure, especially initially when starting from zero. However, once you’ve acquired things like the radio, goggles, and a charger, building and maintaining quads isn’t that much of an expense.
Some of my flight videos: The Best FPV Moments of 2017, Exploring new places, Flow - FPV practice
