When I was at Bealville on Tehachapi Pass a couple years ago, this guy (and not a very sociable one at that) was filming trains with DJI's top-of-the-line Inspire 1 drone. It had a top speed of 49mph, 22mph wind resistance, a signal range of 3.1 miles and 18 min flight time. The new Inspire 2 has the same $3,000 price tag, but has upped the speed to 58mph, the signal range to 4.3 miles and a max flight time of 27 min. Their top-of-the-line version is called the Inspire 2 Cinema Premium. It has a 6K res camera on it and costs $20,000. Imagine losing that investment to some unfortunate event!
This guy I see sometimes at a local park had a $150 Parrot Bebop drone. He controlled it with the touch screen of his smartphone and the camera view displayed on it. He really wanted me to try it and I did, but I hated it. Controlling with a touchscreen that offers no tactile feedback just sucks and your thumbs block some of the screen. It also didn't help that it can lose track of your thumbs if they stray too far outside the range of the onscreen thumb sticks. So I handed it back to him soon after cause I didn't want to be responsible for crashing and breaking his drone.
So the next time I saw him, he brought along his gamepad controller for it cuz he really wanted me to fly it even though I was still nervous about killing his drone. I reluctantly agreed since I feel more at home with a gamepad and it had an unobstructed view of the screen clipped to the top of it. So the plan was that he would get it up in the air out in an open space, then hand the gamepad over to me afterwards. So he fired it up, had it hover 150ft up and 100 yards away from us.
He was just about to hand the controller over to me when all of a sudden the drone had a mind of it's own. It started quickly moving away from us. It wouldn't respond to the controls, nor would it respond to the panic home button that has it automatically return to the GPS coordinates from which it was launched. So we just sat there helplessly watching it speed away towards the horizon over a farm that is next to the park. It eventually crashed into the very top of a tall eucalyptus tree sitting almost a mile away on the other side of a lettuce patch and became stuck there. It was too high to climb up to, so he just left it there and eventually bought another one.
I told him I was soooo glad that the controls weren't in my hands, cuz he would have blamed me somehow for it's loss. I lucked out there!
Posted: Wed Apr 10, 2019 5:55 am
You can be fined if you don't have it.
