Last bit of footage from the Surprise Lake trip, this time from the Skydio2 drone. I don’t fly the drone much because it’s prohibited in many areas (which I strongly agree with) and I personally won’t fly it anywhere near people. When the conditions line up though, it is really cool to be able to get an aerial perspective.
Drones right now are in the awkward teenager stage of their evolution. Every brand has big advantages and big disadvantages. The Skydio has the most advanced self following technology on the market, and a little controller that works like mouse allowing you to literally drag and drop the drone in the sky. It has stunning automatic light balancing and color science. (Although just like everything these days it is oversaturated AF! but that’s easy to deal with).
On the other hand, my Skydio can take minutes to acquire a GPS signal even when piggybacking on the signal to my phone, and often drops the signal again before I can get it up in the air. (Possibly just a problem with my drone?) Skydio also has a bit of a mind of its own and does bizarre things frequently for no apparent reason. We refer to it as “feisty!”
Something it doesn’t have that would be a massive game changer is the ability to pull it directly to you for a hand catch like you can with a Mavic. This is a huge disadvantage for an on-the-water shooter and is the biggest reason we don’t use it very much. Does Mavic have a patent on this? Or maybe they use a different type of tech to make that possible?
Overall though still an incredibly cool piece of technology and I imagine that it’s just gonna get better with each software update. I also just like the company. It’s really impressive that a small US based startup was able to carve out a niche in a market dominated by giants, and do that without moving to overseas manufacturing.
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