school me on drones

i know some of the folks here fly drones, and kind of thinking about getting one. heres what im kinda of looking for. i would like to be able to flynover the fields to check crops, after this big derecho wind storm i have a lot of random debris in the corn and bean fields. i dont have the oomph to randomly walk fields any more. also id like to be able to check roofs ect. what kind of drone would do this? cost involved? how long will they fly? what kind of hand held controller do the use? can you see a live feed from the drone while in flight?

glennster, Check out B&H Photo web site. I have been dealing with the for 30-40 yrs now. Son bought drone from them, are located in New York City good to deal with all kinds of neat stuff and I have a bunch of their stuff in Canon, Olympus, Sony and all kinds of parts and accessories for the pro and the beginner. All of my posted pictures over the years have come from their cameras. They can answer all questions and maybe free shipping.

I have used B&H photo/video as well. Good prices and selection. They have everything from high end expensive stuff to cheap-o stuff. Whatever you are looking for.

I have a Hubsan Zino Pro drone. About $400 with extra battery, chargers, etc. You connect a smartphone to the remote control for live video, settings, and some functions. It's good, but getting it all set up is not clearly outlined in the directions. Tech savvy youngsters would likely have no issues, but I ended up having to contact the manufacturer's support to get a couple things figured out. I helped a cousin set up his DJI drone last year and ran into similar issues. The included manuals assume one is pretty tech savvy about things like Bluetooth settings and USB.

The Zino is supposed to have about a 2 mile range. To get that you would need to be over very open area. When I fly over my back woods it loses the signal once the drone is about 1/4 mile away. Thankfully, the drone has an automatic, GPS based, return to home function for when it loses contact with the controller. Flight time is about 20 minutes max. When the battery power gets to 30% I head for home. You need to be aware of wind and direction when figuring out your flight. Very easy to run out of power before you get it back home if you went too far down wind.

Camera and image quality is really good on the Zino. The camera angle is controlled by a little wheel on the remote. You can point straight ahead to straight down or any angle in between. Of course when you are looking down, you can't see where you are going. I crashed into a tree once because of that despite being about 120 feet up. When the tree is is taller than that.....boom.

To me it is just a toy. I have used it to check if the gutters need cleaning on the second floor, but they almost always do so really not a big "help". For looking for debris in a field it might help. Never tried doing something like that so don't really know how good it might do.

First off I am not a drone expert by any means. I have a DJI Phantom 4 and my son has DJI Mavick.
DJI is the big dog when it comes to drones.
In past years I flew RC planes so I was a bit nervous about flying a drone but they are so easy to fly.
I fly with a large IPAD son flies with his cell phone. Son can get the full potential out of his. He works as a system administrator for a living and understands all this tech stuff.
To buy new I would look at the Mavick. The fold up portability is real nice. Plus his is quieter in flight.

Rusty6 posts a lot of drone videos here and on youtube. He is quite adept with it. Don’t know if he has a drone video about the drone itself. Maybe he’ll chime in here

(quoted from post at 10:49:48 09/05/20) Rusty6 posts a lot of drone videos here and on youtube. He is quite adept with it. Don’t know if he has a drone video about the drone itself. Maybe he’ll chime in here

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There is a love hate relationship with DJI drones. They are the top notch drones, but they sometimes lack customer service, or should I say concern about customers.

If you spend about $1200 you will get a top notch that will do everything you want. Like a Mavic Pro. They have a good battery life, can fly far distances, have great camera.

I could easily check out 500 acres on a flight, with a little time to circle around and examine a thing or two extra. Can fly a mile away as well - farther really, but how much do you want to push it.....

You can see what you are flying over live, as well as recording it. I find while I’m flying I don’t have time to see much detail, I’m busy flying. And the sun reflections on the screen, the small screen you are looking at... better to put the video on a computer screen or tv screen and examine it closely back in the house. You can set up headsets or fancy shrouds and special screens to get past the sun glare out in the open, but......as well most of the time you are seeing a lower resolution live picture than what it is actually recording to a card.

The $400 drones can serve you well, but they have shorter fight times, much shorter distances you can fly away from the controller, and not quite as good a camera. It’s a trade off. I’m not knocking them, just saying that is what you will give up.

For fun to put on YouTube, those cheaper drones work well. The video is always cut back to smaller files anyhow for YouTube!

If you really want to see detail in your fields, you want good camera, high detail. You have no idea how good a detail those cameras can get, we can’t possibly post as clear a video as they internet’ allows us on normal social media places. You know how pictures are degraded to make smaller file, same with video.... my drone will take 4K video, only one of my computers will even handle that resolution, but it’s awesome to see!

If you want to cover quite a few acres in the neighborhood, you want a longer flight time and be able to fly farther away from you.

So, just mentioning the trade offs.

Paul

Paul makes a good point about the video quality. My Hubsan records 4k video and simultaneously records a lower resolution file too. 1.2k IIRC. That's good for me as I don't have a computer with a powerful enough video system to watch 4k video. The drones with 4k video also need a extra high speed micro SD memory card rather than a more typical regular micro SD card.

My son-in-law got 1 at Best Buy a few years ag0. It takes great video and pictures. I think it was around $500.00

I do not have one yet, but when I do I want one with the return home, that records the GPS location it was launched from, and if for any reason it losses contact with the controller it automatically returns to launch site.

Food for thought.... had a buddy that had two different drones. Each time he would push the return to home button, they would drop like a rock out of
the sky. He was able to retrieve both of them. A couple years back I had stayed in Butte for a couple days. There was a fellow at the hotel I stayed
at, who was an avid drone flyer. He was doing a flyover of Berkley pit when the battery started getting low on his craft (think it was a JDI??). He
had the same issue when he pressed the return to home button. His drone is now one more thing to clean out of the pit. Lol!

May want to search for that issue in the product reviews of what you seek.

Mike

(quoted from post at 20:25:45 09/06/20) . He was doing a flyover of Berkley pit when the battery started getting low on his craft (think it was a JDI??). He
had the same issue when he pressed the return to home button. His drone is now one more thing to clean out of the pit. Lol!
Mike

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My Autel has the return home feature and it has worked for me. Battery low warning went off half a mile from where I had launched so it turned right around and started heading back to the launch site. I caught up to it in the "Merc" and was there for the landing. Nice when things work the way they are meant to.

Food for thought.... had a buddy that had two different drones. Each time he would push the return to home button, they would drop like a rock out of
the sky. ......

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Both drone controls I have used have a setting for altitude when using the return to home function. When the return home function is used the first thing the drone does is move to that altitude then it goes to the lauch GPS coordinate. If one does not set a valid altitude or too low an altitude a crash is likely.

Setting a high return altitude may seem like the best bet. But , say you set 200 feet, then you burn a fair bit of battery power climbing to 200 before it starts home. You may run out of power before it gets home and again a crash is the result.

I've found the best thing to do is reset the return altitude whenever I'm flying in a different location and set it to something appropriate. I recently was flying at the beach. Return altitude was set to 25 feet. Flying over my back woods I set 200.

So do any of these drones have the ability to record video as well as gps location "stamp" as they fly around?
i.e. looking for debris in a field that you want to yank out.
If you see it on your recorded video, is there a gps location recorded at same time that can be seen in video playback?

That's a good question! Next time I'm flying mine, I'll see if there is some setting for that. For any kind of accuracy, you would have to have the camera pointed straight down so the drone would be directly overhead the object. If the drone is out of sight, I find that a difficult flying mode. I usually move the camera to about 45 degrees so you can look ahead and down. Makes figuring out where you are easier.

As I was typing this I had an idea. If you saw something and wanted to mark the location, you could just take a screenshot of the smartphone. That has the GPS coordinates of the drone and the remote on it.

That's how I found my drone after crashing it into a tree about 1/4 mile away. The drone showed it's last GPS position on the smartphone and I just started walking with the remote/smartphone toward where I had been flying and watched the GPS coordinate for the remote. When the numbers got really close, I moved a branch out of the way and there was the drone about 4 feet from where I was standing.