I had a good first year getting into the FPV hobby. This time last year I was flying my original AcroBee V2, well trying to anyway. It took me a few days to get enough of a feel for the sticks to be able to take off without slamming into the ceiling and let off the throttle without slamming into the floor. I certainly wouldn’t have guess that by now I would have multiple quads and be comfortable flying outside and doing tricks like dives and power loops.
While it started with the NewBeeDrone brushed whoop kit, I don’t think I would still be as interested in flying if I hadn’t gotten my HX100 toothpick for yard flying. Doing laps in the house and then the backyard with the whoop was fun but it started to get monotonous fairly quickly. I also started to run into issues with the aerodynamics, or lack thereof, on the ducted props when I started trying to do dives. Also just the lack of power and responsiveness of the brushed motors. Picking up the HX100 was perfect for me to really start to do more with my outside flight time, without having too much power, noise, or weight like the Acrobrat that I built.
Which brings me to the second major milestone for me for the year. For about the first six months, I was basing everything I was doing and trying to do one information I was getting from other pilots on line, mostly from YouTube or Reddit. The problem with that was most of those pilots were flying full-sized quads, not micros, and they were all flying in larger spaces than I hard access to on the average week night. That’s why I ended up building a 3″ quad to begin with because the conventional wisdom was that anything smaller than that wouldn’t really fly as well as a 5″ quad. So I went with that not realizing, that part of what that meant was the speed and power involved, neither of which I really needed for the smaller spaces I was normally flying in. So figuring that out and getting to the point where I had enough experience with flying and building quads that I could make better decisions on what I needed for my specific situation was a big accomplishment for me.
I had a lot of minor milestones just related to flying this year. Getting comfortable inside, then outside, then learning tricks. Flips, rolls, dives, and yaw spins all came pretty easily to me with some practice. I’m still working on really making them precise but I have the basics. Trying to do power loops or lookbacks though were a struggle. Anything that required me to be inverted I found very disorienting and frightening. Even just trying to chop up a flip into a pair of 180’s required overriding all of the muscle memory I’d built up. I’m better with those things now, for power loops I found it much easier to practice when I started going to nearby parks and fields where I had more space. Learning a new maneuver like that is tough in smaller spaces.
So now that Christmas has come and gone, I’m nearly back where I started. I’m looking at a similar stack of quad parts that I got for presents. I’ll be building a new whoop to fly over the next few months until spring comes and I can get back outside on a regular basis, but this time there’s soldering involved instead of just screws and plugs. I’m using brushed motors instead of brushless. I’m also not stressing about all of the configuration and tweaking that I’ll need to do.
I’m looking forward to another fun year in the FPV hobby.
