Blue View – A New Drone
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Our new drone in flight
A couple of years ago, we bought a high-tech drone, a HolyStone HS720. It had all kinds of nice features like:
automatic take-off and landing;
a ‘Return to Home’ function that directs the drone back and lands it at the original take-off spot if anything goes wrong. If the drone flies out of range or the batteries are getting low… or if I push the RTH button, it’ll come back and land itself;
a ‘Follow-Me’ function, which makes the drone follow along 20 feet or so behind me, just like Marcie (everyone knows I’m kidding, right? Right, Marcie?);
a ‘Point-of-Interest’ function that causes the drone to circle around a spot. This is really nice if you want video footage of your van, for example;
and a host of other features that would have seemed impossible in anything other than a lunar lander just a few decades ago.
The drone’s controller
Probably the most important feature for avoiding crashes by old feeble-minded pilots like me, however, is that when the joysticks are in the neutral position, the drone just hovers in place. If I get confused about which joystick does what, and/or what direction I should be pushing a joystick (which, not surprisingly, isn’t all that unusual), all I need do is let go of both joysticks, and the drone happily stays in place while I figure out what I should be doing. This feature alone, makes it seem that I actually know what I’m doing when flying our drone.
Its only shortcoming was the jerky video images it produced. When it was shooting video, either while hovering in place or moving, all its little course corrections created jitters in the recorded video image. These didn’t render the videos useless by any means. I took lots of video footage that were quite adequate, but my resulting videos would never be mistaken for videos shot by a professional quality drone.
About a year ago, HolyStone introduced an upgraded model, the HolyStone HS720e (aka the HS105). This model has a couple of added software capabilities, but the real improvement is in the new 4k, image stabilized camera. The reviews were glowing, and I’ve been trying to justify buying the new drone since it was released.
Two weeks ago, I bit the bullet and bought one, and we made a trip to Red Rock Canyon, just west of Las Vegas to put it through its paces. I’m really impressed with the videos it produces. All that jerkiness inherent in its predecessor is gone, and the 4k camera produces truly great photos and videos.
One shortcoming of our website host is that we can’t embed videos in a blog. If you’d like to see some actual footage from our new drone, you can check out a YouTube video I just uploaded… Beginner’s Guide to Flying the HolyStone HS720e.
A photo of Red Rock Canyon taken from the drone
This week we’re beginning the process of getting Blanche, our Promaster van ready for her first long road trip. The list of her eventual upgrades is long, but we have a much shorter list of essentials that we want to get done before our first extended trip. More on Saturday. See you then…
Blanche, Getting ready for her inaugural road trip