Originally Posted By: Pete
Yes I will be one more person developing drones. :-)
I have uses for the drones, so it's a definite area of activity for me.

The DJI copters are pretty nice. Flight time is better than average, and flight controls are supposedly good ( but I have not flown one myself). The main drawbacks are that the signal strength limits the DJI unit to about 300 feet range. Also, some users have had "fly always" with the DJI's. Meaning the unit went up into the sky, and didn't automatically fly back when commanded to do so. So your $1000 drone is gone ... Just gone. Not all these problems were operator error, so there are some bugs in the system that they are still working out. Just the same the DJI's are pretty nice. :-)


I have been researching these quadcopters for quite awhile. The range is about 300 meters (984 feet)...not 300 feet.

In the case of the original Phantom, many of the fly away problems were caused by 2.4GHz wifi signals in urban settings interfering with the Phantom flight controls. For my use, this would be a non-issue as I have no plans to buzz around the neighborhood airspace. On the other hand, a majority of fly away problems can be attributed to user error. This very much echoes the same real world of aviation; no matter how much technology any flight aircraft has, it cannot always account for, nor fix user error.
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Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

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