Recently, more and more often you can hear about new versions of multicopter, serving for different purposes. And in any online store that sells electronics, you can find almost hundreds of different models of these aircraft. Therefore, we decided to systematize everything we know about drones, and write this simple instruction for choosing the best quadrocopter for your specific purposes.
The society is experiencing a real fashion boom for drones – small unmanned aerial vehicles that can be controlled through a simple remote control or even with a mobile phone. The dramatically increased popularity of multicopter due to many factors. The first is the growth of their productivity and capabilities. Indeed, now drones can be used both for private purposes, for example, for entertainment and shooting amateur photos and videos from a height, and for professional activities.
Remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles are used for professional aerial photography of the terrain, the creation of feature and documentary films, aerial reconnaissance and surveillance, and cargo delivery. For example, multicopter companies are gradually moving to such large companies as Amazon and DHL, as well as smaller companies, for example, pizzerias.
The second factor in the increased popularity of quadrocopters is directly related to the first. With the improvement of technical characteristics and the increase in the capabilities of these aircraft, the price of previous models sharply decreases. And therefore, devices whose analogues could cost a thousand US dollars a couple of years ago can now be bought for three hundred.
Well, the main factor in the popularity of drones is the love of people to know the unknown. In hundreds of thousands of adult men who saw a quadrocopter in the store for the price of a good smartphone, a seemingly awake child who woke up many years ago is awakening. A person begins to think again with the “I want it!” Category, but this time not his parents, and he is responsible for the budget, and therefore already in the evening of that day this handsome man runs around the courtyard with a multicopter console, enjoying bird’s-eye views and flying up to the windows of the neighbors.
But it’s not so easy to choose a decent aircraft that would ideally fit your adequate wishes, and not just the internal call “I Want!” Indeed, on sale you can find hundreds of various ready-made options in which a person who for the first time encounters this spectrum of offers does not understand that easily. Therefore, we will try in this article to help you with understanding the problem.
To begin with, all multicopter differ from each other in several basic characteristics are listed by AeroFlyDrones.com
- The number of blades
Multicopters are the common name for remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles in which the root “multi” means “many.” The most popular on the market are quadrocopters – devices with four blades, but drones with two, three, six and eight motors can also be found on sale.
In this case, the power of the aircraft, as well as the stability of its flight, depends on the number of blades. But you need to understand, the more motors, the faster the quadcopter batteries are discharged.
- Dimensions
Roughly speaking, multicopter are divided into three main classes in size. The first is the big drones. They are often used for professional purposes. This is a real fetish among people who have ceased to perceive copters as an easy hobby, and have turned them into a serious hobby or even a job.
Large drones can lift a fairly solid load into the sky and fly stably at a height of several kilometers. Such air devices can be equipped with reinforced batteries, as well as a suspension with a SLR camera.
Mid-range quadcopters are the most popular among users. We are talking about fairly small aircraft that can be carried in a backpack, where there will be room for other things.
Often, such drones are equipped with a built-in camera with good resolution, but copters are more common, to which this addition needs to be attached separately.
Small and very small multicopters – this is an offer for beginners who love remote-controlled flights. These devices can fit in a briefcase or even in your pocket, because their smallest variants easily fit in the palm of an adult. Due to the small size, such drones have problems with flight stability, because any gust of wind knocks them out of the way or even knocks them to the ground.
- The presence of the camera.
The cornerstone of the choice of a particular multicopter. As mentioned above, there are models of drones with cameras already built into them. At the same time, the pattern is observed that the larger the quadcopter, the less chance that there will be a camera in its basic configuration.
The best option in this case is some medium-sized drones with built-in cameras with good resolution (10-14 megapixels). However, most connoisseurs of unmanned aerial vehicles prefer to personally install a camera on their multicopter. Most often we are talking about the famous extreme GoPro camera.
But there are also many other offers in the market of cameras for extreme shooting, as well as special modules for multicopter.
On small quadrocopters, in the vast majority of cases, the camera comes as standard, it is built into the body of the aircraft. But this is a fairly simple device with a photomatrix ranging in size from 0.3 to 2 megapixels.
- Management principles
Most of the most popular quadcopter models can be controlled using a smartphone or tablet computer, connecting to them via a wireless Wi-Fi communication interface. This is incredibly convenient, because control over the device is carried out through a simple and intuitive interface. By moving the fingers on the touch screen of the mobile device, the user can control the altitude, speed and direction of flight of the drone, see the image from his camera in real time, as well as take pictures and record videos from a bird’s eye view with just one click.
But this principle of multicopter control has a significant drawback – the device can be removed from the person controlling it by only a few tens of meters, that is, the range of the Wi-Fi signal. Therefore, instead of smartphones and tablets, you can use special control panels.
They allow you to increase flight range to an indicator of several kilometers. At the same time, the control process itself becomes much more complicated – remotes have many additional features and capabilities that mobile devices do not have.
However, mobile devices can be combined with “professional” multicopter control panels. For example, it is possible to use them as a screen for the image from the drone’s camera, if the console itself does not have a built-in display.
- Batteries
Another important point when choosing a quadcopter. After all, the greater the capacity of the batteries from which it is powered, the longer and further it can fly. At the moment, the average performance of the basic drone on one full battery charge is 8-15 minutes.
But large aircraft can be equipped with additional batteries, which can increase their flight time to half an hour. With medium and small multicopters, such an “upgrade” is more difficult to carry out – the power of their propellers may not be trivial to lift another battery into the air. Moreover, this is far from always possible at the hardware level.
However, the problem of low battery capacity in multicopter can be partially solved through the use of spare batteries, which can be inserted in the place of discharged, landing before the drone on the ground.
Above, we talked about five basic fundamental factors that can affect your choice when buying a ready multicopter. And below we show you some of the most popular modern models of drones.