Upstate city approves funding for quadcopter - WHNS Greenville

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Haha - looks like a waste of money (for now). But they might be smart. If they restrict things so that it requires a license to fly and you need some kind of training to obtain a license, they will be in a good position to corner the market.
 
I like the idea of having a business related to this hobby and although I prefer as little government involvement in my life as possible when the day comes that they finally regulate this field I will probably get in line for the license or whatever it is that they require.
 
I like the idea of having a business around the hobby too, and when me and my buddies got into it, we thought we'd be doing some professional aerial photography and filming - but then we found out it's illegal to fly commercially and all of the guidelines that are out that allow you to fly in the US are for hobby purposes only.
 
True, but as I watch nature programs and survivorman and a lot of other things I am certain that they are using quads to get the shot. A lot of it is filmed outside the US though. I know realtors are using them to showcase high end property's, supposedly the way around the rules is that you preform all the filming for free then charge for the film editing, well that and the fact that no one is really regulating the quad filming industry right now so even though you're operating outside of the RC hobby category there are no defined rules as whats allowed beyond that. There's no enforcement so you can pretty much get away with a lot. I see you tube videos all the time that are way beyond the supposed 400' ceiling. I think the main road block would be that once you made it official and got a business license and tax ID number for "Quadcopter Filming Inc" you would open yourself up to scrutiny because you can't have a quadcopter filming business to begin with. As much as I think it would be cool to do this job for a living I cringe at the thought of being at a festival or concert and having a malfunction over the crowd.
 
That's very true about those shows. There's probably some permit process or something. I know they've been drones for a long time for filming in and out of the US. I read an article about some real estate agents in LA that got in trouble for using quadcopters to get shots of their listings - but then there's a lot of other people doing it without being hassled. I guess it's really just a huge gray area, or at least the enforcement is inconsistent.

Yeah, people violate the ceiling all of the time and I've even flown at certain parks and only after realized it was within the 3 or 4 miles of an airport restriction. When it comes to your other issue regarding malfunction over a crowd, that's my biggest fear too - or even a fly-away, which would be worse because you'd have no clue where it was going to come down. I think what would be a really nice development is if someone could create some sort of parachute that took into account altitude and downward velocity and deployed in an unplanned free fall scenario.
 
The parachute is a good idea but figuring out how it would deploy would be tricky. Once it deployed it could activate a GPS tracker. A good OSD system while recording your FPV would also give you an idea of where it crashed but if it flew away that would be a whole other problem entirely. there's a lot of technology available out there all it costs is money and the weight penalty of putting it on the quad. The more money I have wrapped up in these things the more conservative I fly. I will step up to a bigger quad with a gimbal eventually, I just hope I'm confidant enough to get the video footage that I want, over water and canyons etc. Thinking about coming up with some basic rules to flying that will help reduce screw ups like 1 kilometer max distance, 500' elevation, always have GPS return to home available, always return at a certain voltage level. never fly above a certain wind speed. At this point I don't even have OSD so I have a ways to go.
BTW mm, have you heard of Sacramento Area Park Flyers?
 
That's true about the GPS tracker - although, I'm just thinking for safety, first and foremost. Safety of people AND the copter. If a prop breaks in flight, it would be nice if a parachute would open on the way down. On a flyaway, you'd need GPS to find it most likely, but then again, I'm guessing on a fly away, the direction would be straight up - or maybe not - I've never seen one or actually heard of one... other than someone's copter returning to home while it was in their house or something.... or what happened to me, I had a turnigy 9x with default firmware and there was a bug that caused it to send half throttle for a couple of seconds to the rx when it was powered up. I forgot to disarm the board and turned my tx off, then turned it back on before it automatically disarmed and I had a "fly away" into my ceiling =) Not fun.

I just figure with all of the great minds designing stuff around quads, they'd be able to create some kind of a parachute that knew when to deploy (and was light weight) and has some kind of a system so you could track the quad down... or use telemetry/OSD with a GPS unit, like the frsky stuff.

That's the other thing that sucks too. When I got into the hobby, I thought the money would be the big concern when adding features, but now that I have a lot invested, I'm usually more concerned with the weight added when adding things to my copters.

All those rules are great, but every craft is different, so I think the real rule is to just start out slow and ease into things before you start pushing the limits.

I heard about the sac park flyers when I started, but I forgot all about them. I just checked out the site and there is a ton of activity, and a lot of the recent stuff is about multirotors. I didn't realize how many people were into the hobby around here. Do you fly with them? If so, are the events pretty cool? I've actually never flown anywhere with any other RC craft in the air. If I fly with my only other friend who has a quadcopter, we don't ever both fly at the same time because it seems somewhat risky - especially with FPV since we don't have a 360 degree view around the copters with our goggles on.

I typically either fly on my parents' property since they have some land and all of the surrounding properties around them have quite a bit of land.... or either by myself, or with my buddy, we'll drive around and scope out parks that have a lot of space and don't have anyone around. When me and him started flying, we would just go to any old parks near our houses, or fly in the neighborhood, but we quickly learned that you end up spending more time answering people's questions than flying.... and the worst thing is when people you've never met before ask you if they can try to fly your copter, or they want to put on your FPV goggles while you fly to see what it's like. I'm all about sharing the love, but I think it's pretty peaceful to fly, so I usually don't like all the attention - plus it takes up hours of time.
 
Sac park flyers is just a web forum. They are not a club or organized very much beyond that which I like because no one is judging you and making you follow some inane rules. I met up with a guy on a Sunday and he sold me some props that he wasn't using any more. It was at a field in elk grove. Everybody was really cool and eager to help out and share info. I will definitely go back again.I did not bring my quad that day but will eventually. There were a lot of plane people that day but there's a lot of quad people too. The dog fighting thing sounds like it would be cool to check out too. Planes are different from quads because they really take a beating. No one was flying anything that was nice or really expensive. A lot of home made stuff but still cool. I hear you on the flying alone thing. It's nice because you avoid that ackward situation of someone watching a grown man cry when he crashes and destroys his expensive quad. Lol
 
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Oh - I knew it was a forum, but I assumed it was based on some kind of a club. Where about were they flying in Elk Grove?

Haha, exactly. Or when you crash and you just want to go home and forget about it for awhile. I assume if you're out flying with people and you crash, you'd probably seem like a baby if you just left mad. You'd almost probably feel obligated to hang around and socialize for awhile.
 
yeah its just a bunch of guys hanging out. only 3 were flying and the others were just watching and chatting. It was the elk grove location. I don't ever get mad when I crash but a little embarrassed or bummed out. I'm not even sure how their signals don't get crossed. Almost everyone had the same transmitter. I guess when you use spread spectrum it doesn't matter. I would like to go there sometime other than Sunday when its not crowded.
 
LongRangeRC provided some excellent information regarding regulations as well as some of his experience with the FAA in getting approval to fly one of his models for law enforcement / search and rescue, etc., so I moved that part of the conversation here:

http://quadcopterforum.com/threads/great-info-about-us-faa-regulations-for-multirotors.3255/

That allowed me to sticky it so we can get more eyes on it since it contains some very good info. I will close this thread and the conversation can be continued over there.
 
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