101–110 of 452 posts
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I've had a Mini V1 since 2020 and here are my uses: * Fun Flights * Aerial photography of yard projects * Towing fishing lures way beyond furthest castable distance * Fireworks videos * Hiking Scouting * Surveillance drone ( Caught some motorbikers trespassing on property and tracked them back to house ) * Firewatch * Pester folks safely from patio
How do you drop the lure?
So we fly it out 200m and then lock the line and it pops out of basket.
Risky, but very fun
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The mini is pretty damn quiet. At 50ft of altitude people don't hear it. AT 100ft of altitude people don't even see it. I've flown one hundreds of times and other than other drone owners no one has ever said a thing or noticed. The drone owners notice and come over to talk drones.
I've been annoyed by drones lots of times and never talked to the operators. It's not because I didn't notice.
I've been annoyed and not talked to people too, but it was never the noise, it was blatant violation of the law flying over crowds, etc..
I always look at these and think I want one but also can't think of what i'd actually use it for. I just picture it sitting in a closet next to my GoPro and Oculus after about 3 days of messing around. Anyone own one? What do you use it for?
- It's OK to fly there and you're not going to annoy anyone
- You can get some interesting photos.
Having previously flow R/C airplanes and aircraft drones like DJI makes are not actually that entertaining to fly, they are too easy and not that engaging.
So it's all about the photos. You'll see new people flying at a park or something, but after a while you're basically thinking the park is not a very interesting thing to take pictures of.
I've been looking forward to the release of the Mini 4 Pro so I can hopefully get a Mini 3 Pro on the cheap. I want something that can autonomously follow me on my mountain bike or follow my RC car as it goes over jumps for under $500.
If you want the drone to autonomously track you, then the mini 4 pro is the only realistic choice since it has obstacle detection at all directions. The mini 3 pro does not have obstacle detection at the sides. In a mountain bike scenario, the drone is mostly capturing you on the side and it is moving sideways itself. So, unless you want to fly it next to the sea, you want to have sideways obstacle detection. Or, jus…
That said, I'm starting to lean towards spending the extra money to pick up the Mini 4 Pro, especially if Costco runs a good bundle deal. Like right now, they sell a Mini 3 Pro bundle for $839 that includes the drone and RC-N1 controller, 2 extra batteries, charging hub, and a 128 GB SD card. All that would be $1,063 if bought from DJI directly.
Streaming 1080p/60fps up to 20km wirelessly is mind boggling to me. What kind of tech is used to make that happen? seems like it'd require a lot of power.
Communicating with a drone up in the sky is easier than something like your WiFi or your cell phone because you have a nice, clear line of sight to the drone. Fly behind a hill, building, or some trees at distance and the drone will lose connection and go into safety mode.
The free space path loss at 20kM is 126dB at 2.4GHz in perfect conditions, or 134dB at 5.8GHz. If you start with the 1 Watt nominally allowed by regulations, that's +30dBm. Subtract 126dB and you're left with -96dBm. That's a weak signal, but it's actually close to the receive sensitivity of the WiFi card in your laptop, believe it or not. I would guess the DJI gear uses narrower channels than WiFi to achieve a better noise floor than the 20MHz (or wider) channels you get with WiFi.
The 20km figure is really an extreme upper limit. Realistically you'd probably need a high-gain antenna pointed in the direction of the drone to achieve it.
I have a Spark and a Mavic Air 2. I really love flying the Spark, it's a fun zippy little drone. I'd compare it to something like a Miata. The Mavic on the other hand is all serious, professional utility. It's more like a mini-van. It's a great tool but it's not even remotely fun to fly. My biggest issue with my Spark is the 9 minute battery life. Even though I have 4 batteries, having to constantly land and swap the…
Which at some point becomes boring. Like you usually don't have enough interesting things to do with the drone to stay engaged that long.
So something like a 45 minute flight is not going to make me buy a newer one, cause i don't have something interesting/important I need to do for that long.
Where is the US or EU competitor to DJI? They are running away with it. Oh right, we instead pioneered regulation and legislation , all those deaths from drones falling down and drones hitting planes.
GoPro tried and failed, but I don't think regulation and legislation were the reason.
GoPro started IIRC as a company that just branded cameras they ordered from overseas.
it would be neat to mount some sort of weather proof container on a tree with a solar panel that it could go into, so then it's like a bird. could imagine some shared spec and network of these so they can charge, lying in wait.
> lying in wait What are they waiting for?