I'm really starting to think that I might want to race drones. Anyone doing that or have any first-hand knowledge that you can pass along?
I've never really had much interest in getting one, but my neighbor just got a new one and was testing it out last night and it looks like I might have to get one for Rocky. It seems chasing drones is as much fun as digging moles or getting a drink from the firehose. This looks to be an even better way than lake tennis to let him get his exercise without putting too much of a strain on the old geezer's heart. A quick scan of YouTube shows that not only is this a common canine practice, but also he has a separated at birth twin (EDIT: At 5:38 in the video. I've been trying for twenty minutes to get a YouTube start time parameter past the RP editor and I'm just giving up for now) out there which I guess you sort have to expect with a dog.
The Drone Leaker Daniel Hale was an Air Force intelligence analyst who hated American empire, found Edward Snowden too compromising, and taught us almost everything we know about the drone war. The documents he leaked were published in 2015. But nothing changed.
Anyone can build a combat drone. If you build a drone for your little makeshift country, no one will be impressed. We may think of drones as indestructible, ironclad, and this is the impression defense companies attempt to impart with the hard names they give the machines they build â Predator drone, Reaper drone, Hunter drone â but in fact the original word, drone, is elegantly apt, and all of these are an attempt to mask the dumb delicacy it captures. Drones are flimsy, light little wisps of things, vulnerable to lost signals and sleepy pilots, vulnerable to gusts of wind and hard rain, lightning, ice. You will send a drone whirling into the sand should you turn too hard into a breeze or press the wrong button on your joystick; should you fly into an area of excessive electromagnetic noise or accidentally fly the drone upside down for a long while, oblivious. They slam into mountains, crash into other planes, fall into farms, sidewalks, and waterways. Sometimes they simply go silent and float away, never to be found again. Hundreds and hundreds of military drones we have lost this way, scattered across the globe. Itâs okay. Theyâre cheap. We make new ones. (...)
Daniel told none of his friends he was ready to talk, but on April 4, he called me. He said he didnât want to be called a whistleblower. He preferred the word traitor.
No one owns a secret state, and no one answers for it. There was a moment in 2012, 2013, when various people outside Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan began to notice that inside Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan, the U.S. was waging constant, secret war under a set of rules known to few. It was May 2013 when Obama finally felt it necessary to give his big drone speech, in which he acknowledged that drones were morally complicated, promised to âreview proposals to extend oversight,â deemed them an unfortunate necessity for the safety of Americans, and generally gave the impression that he would make the program accountable. But everything of note that happens in this story happened after such gestures were forced, and made, and forgotten. (...)
Over the course of the War on Terror, as we used to call it before it simply became American foreign policy, swathes of Pakistan and Yemen came to be under 24-hour surveillance by drone, which is to say that people living in these areas today cannot cross the street without knowing that they are being recorded and that the recording will be sent to a satellite and sucked into a receiver, where the footage will be stored in the service of someoneâs idea of American security. It will very likely never be watched, because there are not enough analysts to analyze all of the footage that the U.S. produces; where privacy is afforded, it is afforded by the grace of inefficiency. Drones, writes Michael Boyle, a senior fellow in national security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, have âled the United States to displace its original goal â to fight al Qaeda more effectively â in favor of a larger one of knowing, and possibly even controlling, greater portions of the earth than it had previously imagined possible.â (...)
The point behind this is that, although nations can/do certainly control drones, their tech is freely available to all with enough money and these people can create extraordinary havoc based on their own person agenda.
I think a few years ago, the learning curve was very expensive. A friend lost a several-hundred-dollar one; it flew out of range or had some mishap and was never seen again. Now they automatically return if they lose contact with the base station (your phone) and have pretty good sonar that won't allow them to run into things, even tree limbs that are blowing in the wind.
You have to be aware of wind conditions though. And have an FAA permit and all sorts of other permits to fly in a national forest etc. A guy I know has a big heavy one that can execute a programmed route âfly it one time to identify position and camera angles, mark the coordinates, then tell it to link all of those points together in one smooth shot. It's pretty cool. But the heavy one is noisy; it's the kind that people want to shoot down. Another guy has one that's whisper-quiet but a lot more susceptible to wind gusts. But he uses it at the ski hill sometimes (permitted) to check out remote areas (this summer he was looking at a bear to make sure it was away from some customers)... he flies it out about 2 miles without a problem, then when he's done looking at whatever, hits the "return" button on his phone and walks away. The thing comes back to where it started and lands right there, which in this case was a picnic table on the deck.
I'd say yes, easy, and yes, would be a lot of fun.
Does anyone own a drone? Are they fun to fly for more than a half dozen times? Are they easy to learn to operate?
I think a few years ago, the learning curve was very expensive. A friend lost a several-hundred-dollar one; it flew out of range or had some mishap and was never seen again. Now they automatically return if they lose contact with the base station (your phone) and have pretty good sonar that won't allow them to run into things, even tree limbs that are blowing in the wind.
You have to be aware of wind conditions though. And have an FAA permit and all sorts of other permits to fly in a national forest etc. A guy I know has a big heavy one that can execute a programmed route —fly it one time to identify position and camera angles, mark the coordinates, then tell it to link all of those points together in one smooth shot. It's pretty cool. But the heavy one is noisy; it's the kind that people want to shoot down. Another guy has one that's whisper-quiet but a lot more susceptible to wind gusts. But he uses it at the ski hill sometimes (permitted) to check out remote areas (this summer he was looking at a bear to make sure it was away from some customers)... he flies it out about 2 miles without a problem, then when he's done looking at whatever, hits the "return" button on his phone and walks away. The thing comes back to where it started and lands right there, which in this case was a picnic table on the deck.
I'd say yes, easy, and yes, would be a lot of fun.
yes the best thing one can do is stay below 250 grams (for $399 you can get the mini)
Does anyone own a drone? Are they fun to fly for more than a half dozen times? Are they easy to learn to operate?
I think a few years ago, the learning curve was very expensive. A friend lost a several-hundred-dollar one; it flew out of range or had some mishap and was never seen again. Now they automatically return if they lose contact with the base station (your phone) and have pretty good sonar that won't allow them to run into things, even tree limbs that are blowing in the wind.
You have to be aware of wind conditions though. And have an FAA permit and all sorts of other permits to fly in a national forest etc. A guy I know has a big heavy one that can execute a programmed route âfly it one time to identify position and camera angles, mark the coordinates, then tell it to link all of those points together in one smooth shot. It's pretty cool. But the heavy one is noisy; it's the kind that people want to shoot down. Another guy has one that's whisper-quiet but a lot more susceptible to wind gusts. But he uses it at the ski hill sometimes (permitted) to check out remote areas (this summer he was looking at a bear to make sure it was away from some customers)... he flies it out about 2 miles without a problem, then when he's done looking at whatever, hits the "return" button on his phone and walks away. The thing comes back to where it started and lands right there, which in this case was a picnic table on the deck.
I'd say yes, easy, and yes, would be a lot of fun.
Thanks, Scott. I was surprised at the short flight time and the short control distance even for the 2-3 hundred dollar dealies: 15 minutes and 300 meters. They're surely over my head even with the affordable chinese units that have all those cool bells and whistles. I like the "follow me" feature and would try it in falconry someday. Maybe someday I can fool around with a 50 buck unit just for a larf. I guess $500+ might get you quiet brushless motors, long flight time and distance, gimballed 4k camera, etc - but I wasn't even looking at those. I'll need a hobby if we don't find any rabbits this winter. Might have to take up jigsaw puzzles...
Yeah the flight time is a problem with batteries/weight. It's getting better but I assume better=$$$
Does anyone own a drone? Are they fun to fly for more than a half dozen times? Are they easy to learn to operate?
I think a few years ago, the learning curve was very expensive. A friend lost a several-hundred-dollar one; it flew out of range or had some mishap and was never seen again. Now they automatically return if they lose contact with the base station (your phone) and have pretty good sonar that won't allow them to run into things, even tree limbs that are blowing in the wind.
You have to be aware of wind conditions though. And have an FAA permit and all sorts of other permits to fly in a national forest etc. A guy I know has a big heavy one that can execute a programmed route âfly it one time to identify position and camera angles, mark the coordinates, then tell it to link all of those points together in one smooth shot. It's pretty cool. But the heavy one is noisy; it's the kind that people want to shoot down. Another guy has one that's whisper-quiet but a lot more susceptible to wind gusts. But he uses it at the ski hill sometimes (permitted) to check out remote areas (this summer he was looking at a bear to make sure it was away from some customers)... he flies it out about 2 miles without a problem, then when he's done looking at whatever, hits the "return" button on his phone and walks away. The thing comes back to where it started and lands right there, which in this case was a picnic table on the deck.
I'd say yes, easy, and yes, would be a lot of fun.
Thanks, Scott. I was surprised at the short flight time and the short control distance even for the 2-3 hundred dollar dealies: 15 minutes and 300 meters. They're surely over my head even with the affordable chinese units that have all those cool bells and whistles. I like the "follow me" feature and would try it in falconry someday. Maybe someday I can fool around with a 50 buck unit just for a larf. I guess $500+ might get you quiet brushless motors, long flight time and distance, gimballed 4k camera, etc - but I wasn't even looking at those. I'll need a hobby if we don't find any rabbits this winter. Might have to take up jigsaw puzzles...
Does anyone own a drone? Are they fun to fly for more than a half dozen times? Are they easy to learn to operate?
I think a few years ago, the learning curve was very expensive. A friend lost a several-hundred-dollar one; it flew out of range or had some mishap and was never seen again. Now they automatically return if they lose contact with the base station (your phone) and have pretty good sonar that won't allow them to run into things, even tree limbs that are blowing in the wind.
You have to be aware of wind conditions though. And have an FAA permit and all sorts of other permits to fly in a national forest etc. A guy I know has a big heavy one that can execute a programmed route âfly it one time to identify position and camera angles, mark the coordinates, then tell it to link all of those points together in one smooth shot. It's pretty cool. But the heavy one is noisy; it's the kind that people want to shoot down. Another guy has one that's whisper-quiet but a lot more susceptible to wind gusts. But he uses it at the ski hill sometimes (permitted) to check out remote areas (this summer he was looking at a bear to make sure it was away from some customers)... he flies it out about 2 miles without a problem, then when he's done looking at whatever, hits the "return" button on his phone and walks away. The thing comes back to where it started and lands right there, which in this case was a picnic table on the deck.
I'd say yes, easy, and yes, would be a lot of fun.
