You guys give us (me) less informed a lesson.
1. What features to look for when buying a drone?
2. What is the price range for the ones you own?
3. How difficult is it to learn to use?
4. How much are repairs when it flies into a tree?
5. Where to look to buy one?
From what I see that would be an excellent way for me to check fence lines and creek crossings without venturing into the sticks! Could even check to see if the cows are under their favorite trees, or neighbor's pasture!
1. Look for something with "training" mode, GPS guidance (i.e. when you put it in a spot it stays there even with wind), a viewable display (i.e. you can see in real time what the camera sees), automatic takeoff and landing, flight time of 20 minutes or more per battery, return to home feature. Other features that are cool; follow mode (drone follows controller like if you are in a vehicle), auto pilot (you can program a flight path and drone will fly it), point of interest (set point and radius and drone will circle that point).
2. I got the Xstar with 1 mile range, 3 batteries, hard case, extra propellers, 4K camera for about $900, extra battery included sale and 1 free battery from manufacturer.
3. Very easy, I used auto takeoff and land until I was familiar with it. It is very fast and I was surprised how high 400ft is.
4. I have seen a few crashes and had a kinda hard landing myself. My drone did not sustain any damage but the crashes I saw basically just broke some propellers. If it sinks in water you are basically toast unless you can do something to make it water tight.
5. I would start with 'http://www.drone-works.com/'.
Some things to note: when I started looking at drones I was looking at the DJI phantoms and back then it was something like $1,800 for the drone and the GoPro camera was another $600. Too pricey for me especially since I was reading a lot from owners that said the GPS failed and the drone took off never to be seen again.
I have no idea if the problems still exist (I suspect not) or what the current cost of a DJI is. I would say to think about what you want to do with it (i.e. do you need a 1 mile range, a 1/2 mile is cheaper), how long will you be flying (i.e. do you need extra batteries?), are you looking for high resolution cameras (i.e. do you need to be able to zoom a picture to see faces from a photo taken at 400 feet?). Some things to consider...
Good luck and whatever you decide to buy, happy flying.
