This is the tale of my auspicious maiden drone flight. Back in October of 2016 I was buying a firearm at Rural King, and while I waited for the NICS check to clear, wifey and I cruised the store. I ran across a Syma X5SW quadcopter on sale for a mere $79.On a whim, I bought it.
The thing WiFi’s with your smartphone and captures so-so video. The interface seemed to work well enough, and I had no problem assembling or getting the unit to sync with the free app.
It was obviously an entry-level unit, but hey, I’d never piloted a drone before, so entry-level was good.
Well, here’s my very first drone flight video… and in my opinion it’s perfect. At only a minute and change, it documents my getting the thing up in the air, capturing a fleeting glimpse of our house and the ongoing deck project, some admittedly low-res imagery of Brown County in Autumn… and then the limb-ridden chaos of the drone getting stuck in a tree approximately 40 feet in the air.
As luck would it, the drone settled into its arboreal nest pointing the camera directly down near where I was standing, so my reaction to the entanglement was captured on the video. LOL
Determined to not let this mishap be the end of my career as an amateur drone pilot, I ran down to Bear Hardware and bought a few sections of ¾’ PVC conduit pipe, came back and set up my 12′ ladder, twisted the PVC sections together to make a long, lightweight (if flimsy) pole, and thus elevated was able to nudge my craft from the oak’s clutches… from which it fell a few feet and and got lodged in yet another limb. A couple more pokes finally sent my little drone to the ground, none the worse for wear.
A lot of fun to be sure, though a lot more work than I had anticipated. I suspect most fledgling drone pilots go through this. I’m just lucky the drone wasn’t so high in the tree that it would have proved impossible to retrieve.
Whatever became of my drone, you ask? Well, it sat in its box for three years, and this past summer I bartered it to a neighbor boy in exchange for some shoveling I needed done around the homestead.
And what did he do with it? Well, he *is* a neighbor, and all our neighbors have a lot of trees around their place, so… you get the picture. Last I heard, my ill-fated little drone is getting ready for winter in an undisclosed location.
If you enjoy my blog and would like to help support my efforts,
kindly toss a few bucks my way by clicking here:
https://www.paypal.me/stringdancer
And if you’d care to respond on this site to this post,
you first need to cross a modest pay-wall of only $1/month, via PayPal.
(Pay-walls act as a deterrent to trolls and spammers.)
Click HERE to sign-up, or HERE to review the TOS. And thank you! ~~ JF
