Please don’t call it a drone, it can’t do anything by itself.
After watching this video and a bunch of Flite Test videos, I decided that multicopters were cool and that I really wanted one.
Being new to RC aircraft, I started small with a Hubsan x4 so that if I was a terrible pilot or just didn’t like the hobby I wouldn’t be breaking the bank on a toy. I turned out to be terrible at flying the thing but it was wicked fun. Within a few weeks two of my friends had bought Hubsan X4’s for themselves, and another bought a knockoff DJI Phantom. The rest of the fall was spent flying around the field outside my apartment building and crashing into fences, walls, the ground, and each other. The X4 is surprisingly robust, surviving full speed crashes into brick walls (with a tailwind!) and tangling with the 10” props of my buddy’s fake Phantom without so much as a broken propeller. The little Hubsan turned out to be a great starter because spare batteries and propellers are dirt cheap, and because I could fly it indoors easily. The latter was important because fall turned to winter, and standing outside in Vermont without gloves on for extended periods of time isn’t exactly a pleasurable experience.
By mid-December, I was still having tons of fun flying the Hubsan and I had gotten good enough to fly confidently and consistently so I started looking into larger multirotor aircraft with first person viewing (FPV) capability. I picked a ready-to-fly 250 class quadrotor from myrcmart.com because it seemed like a good balance between size and maneuverability. Even though MyRCMart seems sketchy, and is run by some dude in China with access to cheap parts, the transaction went smoothly for me. Plus they accept PayPal, so you have that layer of protection if something were to go wrong. I also considered building my own from assorted HobbyKing parts but is was just so much cheaper to buy the pre-built one directly, especially since it included a 7-channel RC transmitter. For FPV gear I bought the starter kit from HobbyKing just because I wasn’t ready to drop hundreds of dollars on legit goggles.
The only things I added to my 250-sized quadrotor were landing gear and LED strips to help with keeping orientation. It actually came from China with some carbon fiber clip-on landing legs, but they weren’t tall enough to touch the ground if I mounted the battery on the bottom of the frame. A few #10-24 bolts through pre-cut holes on the motor mount arms solved that problem for a while, but a few cycles of crashing and bending the bolts then bending them back to straight broke them clean off. One thing I highly recommend is getting a carrying case for all your gear. I got a protective case for my airframe, tools, batteries, spare parts, etc. and it makes travel and setup much easier.
So far I can only say that I’m very happy with my quadrotor from MyRCMart. The carbon fiber frame looks to be high quality, and the arms are thick enough to not instantly shatter when you have a hard crash. In fact, the first time I flew it, I crashed arm-first edge-on into a boulder and the only damage is a small patch of dented carbon. I haven’t experienced any delamination anywhere on the frame. The only other area of damage is on the much thinner top plate, and that’s because I crashed top-first into a metal post, shattering two small supports. The flight control board is mounted directly underneath the cracked sections, but its undamaged so that means the frame did its job and protected the critical electronics.
As of writing this (Late July, 2015) I still haven’t really flown using FPV gear. I tried once right when I got it and was still new at flying, which didn’t work well. My spotters would tell me that people were on the field, and I’d immediately chop the throttle because I was afraid of hitting them even though they were a few hundred feet away. I also recently tried in my backyard, but the combination of low hanging branches and a badminton net made that pretty difficult. Now that I’m a better pilot, I just need to find an empty field (of which there are plenty near me) and probably a spotter. We’ll see.
Update, Late February 2016:
I moved two months after I wrote the first chunk and haven’t gone flying once since then. Its still winter where I am so I probably won’t be flying for another few weeks. Unless I experiment with the FPV gear in my apartment… I live alone and have a reasonable amount of open space. what could possibly go wrong?