Starter drones for those without joystick thumbs

When I first flew the the Ares Spidex the first flick of the throttle took it right to the ceiling, the second flick slammed it down directly to the (fortunately) carpetted flow. Thus I realised to my dismay that both of my thumbs lacked the finesse to fine control the joystick. The training began ...

The Raider micro drone, looks like a craft Flash Gordon would use.

The Ares Spidex and Raider drone are definite the best starter drones to start for those in the same condition as me. Growing up never interested in computer games, pinball machines and the like I must admit that a lot of training and familiarisation is needed to fly drones manually.

Once I had some inkling of how much of a twitch is needed to pull up or pull down the craft, exact left and right movements I steped up to to a slightly bigger done the Ares Shadow (250 size). It's very light, rather powerful and very agile. It's light construction enabled it to fly fast and fall gently without inflicting much damage to the craft.

By this time, I have also acquired the Hubsan's micro drone. I had the X4, X4 Plus with 480 camera and the X4 Plus H107c with 1080p camera with altitude hold. The Hubsan micros are very agile, fast and capable drone even at the beginner's level. Swap to to "expert" and get ready to fumble if you are not yet quite up to speed with the response rate the micro drone are capable of unleashing.

Hubsan X4 Plus micro drone with 480p camera in black and green.

Hubsan X4 Plus micro drone with 480p camera in red and white.

 Hubsan X4 Plus

Hubsan X4 Plus H107c with 1080p camera and altitude hold

Both the Raider and Ares Spidex are very easy going micro drones and very tolerant of pilot errors. They are light and durable, so many knocks indoors would not do too much damage. The propellers of these crafts are also light and made of plastic. The worst you could do is break or damage the propellers, which can be replaced rather easily ... so long as you adhere to the A and B prop placement convention.

I quickly moved to the Hubsans once I approximately was able to discern fine movements on the transmitters. All the time only working in beginner's mode.

The Hubsan micro quads are definitely a joy to fly ... they are responsive and quick to the flick. The model with altitude holdis slightly more sluggish but not by very much.

Discovering RC flights via micro drones.

I'm not quite sure what triggered this drone fever finally, I think it must've been the many bird's eye view from drone pictures I've been seeing on FB and the internet in general. So with zero joystick and RC experience I jumped straight into the  proverbial drone pool ... what better way to learn than starting from the bottom.

I started sniffing around the online RC shops locally and settled for a small toy grade starter drone from Elkjop and quickly ordered a couple more micro size drones online.

My start date to be precise : 08th Mar 2017 , within the week I lost one drone ... a Hubsan Micro X4 Plus that flew away with the wind to god knows where. Attempt to locate it was futile. However that was quickly replaced the very same with the same exact model. By  the 15th of Mar, I've added a few more of these little drones to my collection.

Watching posts by Quadcopter 101, Dustin, Alishanmao, Tigger and numerous other drone video bloggers made it obvious that I needed to start with the most basic drone to get familiar with the sticks and myself more entrenched in this fascinating seemingly simple but fascinating hobby.

It's safe to say that my starting crafts were:
Hubsan X4 Plus (Elkjop)
Ares Spidex 3d (Saeland)
Ares Shadow 250 (RC-Deler)
Raider (Hobbex)
Ares Spidex Micro (RC-Deler)
Hubsan X4 Micro with Camera (Amazon)

These were all the small quads that properly taught me about joystick control : yaws, pitch, spins, flips and the rest of it. It took many crashes and many days of practice before I finally found sufficient finesse in my opposing thumbs and fingers to finally take these drones outdoors. The good thing about these little craft is that they are practically indestructible, perfect for indoor practice, however suitable outdoors in calm windless situations.

In these here blog pages I hope to record and hopefully share the delight and misfortune (of flyaway drones) I encounter in this new hobby. I hope there will be more stories on the delight of flying and not too many of rogue, flyaway drones and hopefully no misfortunes.

Welcome!