What Is the Best Quadcopter for a Beginner?

Where to begin

First of all, a begin­ner needs to choose a cheap quad­copter! A quad­copter for a novice pilot will inevitably fall and crash into obsta­cles. And since the drone is a rather frag­ile thing, your mon­ey will be wast­ed.

What to pay attention to?

There are six main fea­tures and func­tions to look out for:

Flight time.

This is the time the drone will fly on a sin­gle bat­tery charge. Usu­al­ly, in the mod­el spec­i­fi­ca­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ers indi­cate the max­i­mum time, that is, the time obtained in tests under opti­mal launch con­di­tions (with­out a cam­era, with­out pro­peller pro­tec­tion, with­out land­ing legs, in good calm weath­er, at an opti­mal lev­el flight speed). In oth­er words, in prac­tice, you will not be able to get the flight time declared by the devel­op­er. It is worth con­sid­er­ing this when buy­ing!

Advice: buy extra bat­ter­ies now.

Air­speed

con­trol radius

Pres­ence of a cam­era

Con­trol method

Return home

Key features of the right choice

• Sim­ple and con­ve­nient con­trol pan­el
• Crash resis­tance
• small size
• Avail­abil­i­ty of flight modes for a begin­ner
• Good sta­bi­liza­tion

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there is no quad­copter that would have all the list­ed char­ac­ter­is­tics. But man­u­fac­tur­ers are try­ing, and every year new mod­els appear on the mar­ket with func­tions and prices afford­able to every­one.

Below is a detailed descrip­tion of each fea­ture.

Control

Con­trol pan­el (equip­ment, trans­mit­ter)

The remote con­trol should not have many but­tons, so as not to con­fuse a begin­ner. And the size of the remote con­trol should match in size and shape with the joy­sticks of pop­u­lar game con­soles.

Crash resistance

A begin­ner with no expe­ri­ence in pilot­ing a quad­copter will inevitably drop it and crash into obsta­cles. There­fore, the crash resis­tance must be high.

small size

When hit­ting obsta­cles, the size of the quad­copter will great­ly influ­ence the con­se­quences of the crash. The small size will keep them to a min­i­mum, both for those around you and for the drone itself.

Newbie flight modes

For a begin­ner, it will be best if the copter has sev­er­al switch­able dynam­ic modes (Slow / Medi­um / Fast) in the arse­nal of the copter. The pres­ence of the “Head­less” mode will allow a novice pilot to con­trol the quad­copter with­out wor­ry­ing about its posi­tion in the air (no mat­ter which side the drone is turned to the pilot). Also, the Return to Home or RTH func­tion will not be super­flu­ous, when, when you press a but­ton, the drone returns to the con­trol pan­el in auto­mat­ic mode.

Advice: Despite the fact that the Head­less mode great­ly facil­i­tates the first steps in learn­ing to fly, we still strong­ly rec­om­mend that you imme­di­ate­ly aban­don it. First­ly, as prac­tice shows, this approach allows you to ful­ly adapt to pilot­ing a copter, which in the future will sig­nif­i­cant­ly affect the qual­i­ty of con­trol of already more expen­sive UAVs. Sec­ond­ly, this mode is applic­a­ble exclu­sive­ly to toys and you will not find it in the arse­nal of advanced mod­els, which you will come to soon­er or lat­er ????! Instead, com­bine the prac­ti­cal learn­ing process with an FPV sim­u­la­tor, this will allow you to quick­ly mas­ter the basics of UAV pilot­ing and progress in this direc­tion.

Good stabilization

The pres­ence of a four or six axis gyro­scope will allow the quadro­copter to stay more sta­ble in the air, and the begin­ner to avoid crash­ing with minor errors in con­trol. You can find the best mod­els for begin­ner pilots in the table below or here.

Let’s summarize

So, if you real­ly want to get acquaint­ed with this excit­ing hob­by, you need to start small! Save your­self from the desire to imme­di­ate­ly buy expen­sive top mod­els, no mat­ter how tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced they are, since the pri­ma­ry task of a begin­ner — learn how to con­fi­dent­ly and sta­bly con­trol the copter with­in sight with­out the par­tic­i­pa­tion of elec­tron­ic assis­tants. The sim­pler the first quad­copter, the bet­ter.

Com­bine prac­tice with an FPV sim­u­la­tor to increase the num­ber of train­ing ses­sions and thus progress faster and with­out annoy­ing con­se­quences. Note! Prac­tice shows that those who have gone the long way show bet­ter pilot­ing skills in the future, the lev­el of which, among oth­er things, will inevitably affect both the num­ber of errors made and the qual­i­ty of inter­ac­tion with the drone and its pay­load. That’s all we have, we hope our rec­om­men­da­tions were use­ful to you. Good luck! And fly safe­ly!

Video

A short instruc­tive ani­mat­ed video on how not to fly a quad­copter. Remem­ber — safe­ty is para­mount!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_msjeMA9Vfc