What Is The Best Quadcopter For Beginners

If you’re thinking about getting into the RC hobby, then you have most likely seen the quadcopter craze that has swept the world. These little unmanned aerial vehicles are very fun to fly, you can hover, you can go backwards, you can go straight up or down. All things that you can’t really do in an RC plane. But it is also more difficult to learn to fly (Quadcopters 101). The reason for this is due to orientation. With a plane it is much more clear which way is forward, and to maintain lift, you are always going forward. However with a quadcopter, or any multirotor, it is much more difficult to maintain orientation because you have a symmetric frame. If it is a quadcopter, you have 4 motors in an X formation and you can choose which way is forward by how you mount the flight control board. But once you get up in the air you need to know which way is forward, and maintain that orientation through all the maneuvers. I have found that the best way to help maintain orientation is by making the propellers in the front a different color from the propellers in the back. For example, on mine the front two are bright orange, and the black two are blue. This way, when flying, I’m able to tell which way is forward. But even then, if I get a little ways away, it’s not easy to see the props, so some people will add a light weight canopy or a bright ball to indicate forward direction.

So because it is so difficult to learn how to fly a quadcopter, I will always recommend that a beginner buy a small quadcopter toy, before dropping $450 on a DJI Phantom for example. There are a couple good little quadcopter toys out there but my favorite is the Syma X1 Quadcopter. It comes in a few different configurations, you can obtain a space ship, bumblebee, or UFO. It comes with everything you need to fly for just about $30. That includes a 2.4 GHz transmitter so you can fly indoors and outdoors with a pretty good range. It also means that you can fly more than a couple of these guys around. It can also do flips in any direction at the touch of a button!

One important thing to note is how to calibrate it. Lots of people think that their quadcopter is broken because after they plug in the battery and try to fly it, it will always veer off in one direction. This is because when they plugged it in, it wasn’t on level ground when it calibrated the gyros. So what the flight controller thinks is level, really isn’t level. So what you have to do, is plug in the battery, then immediately place it on a flat surface so it can calibrate correctly. Then you are ready to go!