Choosing A Quadcopter For Beginners

Quadcopters are the latest craze all over the world. Many people are fascinated by these little flying creatures that are so easy to move in all directions in the air. Children and adults alike enjoy their new hobby a lot and practice it in all parks when the weather allows. They are much better than RC planes because they offer more flexibility. However, they are a little more difficult to learn how to fly. The biggest problem is the orientation. With a plane, things are much easier, you only have to move it forward and lift it up in the air or make it land.

A quadcopter, like any other multirotor gadget,is more difficult to fly, because you also need to maintain its orientation and that’s complicated when you have a symmetric frame. Quadcopters have 4 motors which are placed in an X formation. Depending on how you mount the flight control board, any of them can correspond to the forward direction. The problem is that once you got it in the air, you need to remember at all times which way is forward. You need to maintain the direction in all maneuvers and that’s quite tricky. What I discovered was that choosing a different color for the front propellers helps a lot. Mine are orange, as opposed to the back ones which are colored in blue. Now I don’t have problems in seeing at a glance with way is froward. This  makes it easier to fly the thing and keep it on the right tracks. Other people prefer to add a bright ball or a canopy to see the forward direction even when the quadcopter is very high or not totally visible because of various obstacles.

This is why I feel that I should give beginners this advice I found useful for myself: buy a small quadcopter toy and play around with it before investing in an expensive one like the DJI Phantom. Syma X1 Quadcopter, for instance, it a pretty little toy, perfect for beginners. It comes in various configurations such as bumblebee, UFO or space ship. It costs only $30 and it has everything it takes for a lot of fun. It includes a 2.4 GHz transmitter, which makes it good for both indoor and outdoor fly. It can also do flips at the touch of a single button.

One thing to keep in mind is that you must pay attention to the correct calibration of your device. Some people, when they first try to fly their quadcopter believe it’s broken because it veers off in one direction. The problem is that the quadcopter was not on level ground when it was plugged in, so when it calibrated its gyros, it didn’t do it right. The right way to start using a quadcopter is to plug in the battery, then place it immediately on a level surface. The calibration will be done correctly and your little bumblebee will be ready to fly the right way.

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