Retractable FPV transmitter boom?????

joshuabardwell

Senior Member
Mentor
The main advantage I can see from this is that it reduces the noise floor near your receiver. But this has questionable benefit, since most people already get more range out of their control link than their video link.

Moving the vTX away from the electronics on the quad has minimal benefit to the video link. It's the receiver that is susceptible to noise, not the transmitter. The vTX picks up noise, if any, from the on-board electronics, via its power wire; not from its antenna, which is only used for transmission, not reception.

My take on it: if noise from your vTX is causing dropouts on your control link, then consider moving the vTX away from the receiver. If you are not having dropouts on your control link, then there isn't a compelling reason to move the vTX away from the receiver.
 

bstanley72

Member
I see problems with this. Would mess with the flight characteristics and when you come in for a landing and forget to retract it (if you have on goggles) I don't see that ending well. Looks like to me to be a bad solution for an uncommon problem.
 

Craftydan

Hostage Taker of Quads
Staff member
Moderator
Mentor
All I see with this snake-oil add-on is a quad hanging inverted from a tree limb it was clearly going to go over . . . from the camera's perspective :p

Gotta hand it to HK for wanting to sell more "nobody else sells it" gear, but some things there are reasons nobody sells it. They probably saw a pic of sombody's DIY mod on one of MANY forums they trawl and saw one comment of "that's cool, I'd buy one of those" . . . and off to the landing gear factory to put a stick on a retract . . . without even a thought as to how stupid a product it might be . . .

What stikes me the oddest: why did they put it on a mini quad frame?!? They HAVE large quad frames, and *could* sell it as an auto-retracting GPS/antenna mast. Sell it in pairs and have the GPS mast fold up on power up and have an FPV antenna fold out after takeoff -- that would be practical and cool . . . but that market isn't as busy . . .