Hello and advice on fpv quadcopter

AddCrow

New member
I am a new member to this forum and I wanted to say hi, introduce myself and ask a question. I’m from Australia and I’ve recently got backing into the hobby of building rc planes after a 25 year hiatus. Back in the day I used to fly with my best friend, and he now has a 15 year old son whose birthday is coming up. Anyway, my mate and his son want to take up a hobby together and they are keen on learning quadcopter flying. I know them well, so I know that they will want to develop this as a hobby rather than fly once, crash and lose interest. They are both model makers, so they can assemble a kit, but they have no gear at all. So that is why I though I’d ask you for advice. I’d like to buy them a quadcopter kit with FPV. They will need everything to get started, but I don’t think I’ll have to buy a transmitter as someone else will buy that. My budget is USD 360 - given that, I would really appreciate any advice on what kit to buy them as I have no idea.

Thanks very much in advance, and I’m pleased to meet you all. Please let me know if I should post this elsewhere too.
 

ElectriSean

Eternal Student
Mentor
Welcome to the forum :)

IMO the best place to start with quads is in a simulator like Velocidrone or Liftoff. From there I would go to a tiny whoop type setup as they are fairly durable and pretty much impossible to hurt yourself with. You can skip this step and go right into a miniquad, there are a lot of BNF/ARF/RTF packages available in your budget, check out UAVfutures on YouTube, he recently did a 'best drones of 2018' episode, and he reviews a ton of them.
 

AddCrow

New member
Thanks very much for this - I will have a look. Flite-Test make their own quads don’t they? Are they any good for my needs?
 

ElectriSean

Eternal Student
Mentor
They make a few frame kits and sell power packs for them. They used to offer a build service as well, I don't know if that's still a thing. For a first quad I'd recommend against building your own as the learning curve is pretty steep, but it's not impossible if you have soldering skills and some basic electronic knowledge.