Anyone ever heard anything about these?
Last night we were having a bonfire and 3 drones flew over our neighborhood, one after another about 1 minute apart. It was about 9:30 pm 20 miles outside of a major midwest city. Normally I would think someone simply got a nice drone using their stimulus, but there were 3, they were moving way faster than a typical hobbyist drone, all of them had one constant blue light and never circled back, just disappeared in the distance. These things were moving really fast, but we could still barely hear their rotors. I would compare their speed to lifeline helicopters that have flown over in the past.
There’s an army base probably 15 mi south, but idk. The base has plenty of mileage and controlled airspace for training, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to potentially loose one in a residential area.
could be someone testing a GPS waypoint feature on a hobby drone.
depending on how they are constructed, even those big heavy camera drones can haul ass if you tune them right, they just normally fly slower (by changing input rates) to give the controls more "squish" so they are easier to manually fly.
that also doesn't account for some of the racing drones that are purpose built for speed... they all can use similar GPS waypoint missions in their flight controllers though most use simpler/lighter systems that are less prone to error/failure.
either multirotor or airplane, they can all use the same tech.
if you're in the hobby at all you can tell the difference in how they sound but either way it could be a simple test.
it's useful for lots of things but when i got my first drone up and running one of the first missions i did was just to test out flying a big circle around the neighborhood.
no reason someone couldn't have told it to do 3 laps instead of 1.
or could just as easily be the military testing stuff.
Sounds like I need one of these.
if you're looking to get into it... check out RCtestflight...
https://www.youtube.com/user/rctestflight
he's currently doing waypoint missions with a boat
https://youtu.be/8zetRlliUO4
but the same controller (i think he's using a pixhawk) can be used in conjunction with the onboard GPS antenna to constantly check global positioning relative to the surface... and uses an altimeter (some even use simple radar-like sensors) to place aircraft at the altitude you want.
i built the drone to take flyby video of golf courses hole-by-hole from tee to cup.
i can use google maps to pre-plan the flight and tell it to start the run behind the tee at near to ground level, then accelerate to the tee while climbing altitude...
dogleg left or right, circle the flag, fly high into the air to get a birdseye view of the green...
fair warning though, this can become a very expensive and frustrating hobby.
i'm taking a long break after an expensive crash.