Drones & Quads
Drones / quadcopters / multirotors are the least explored part of RC flying for me – I didn’t want to do this at all in the beginning. I always dreamed about flying RC plane, then possibly flying FPV on longer distance, and even possibly flying autonomously for very long distance, e.g. 320 km from my city to the capital city. And with that vision I always knew that for longer flight duration I need a plane, which needs much less energy for flight than quadcopter, which is energy hungry thing. Thus I’ve avoided them.
But with the long winters came boredom and inability to go outside to fly the planes got me thinking of having similar fun indoors. I’ve bought this toy drone of eBay for 25 Euro and I was flying in the living room…
When the spring came, I’ve come to conclusion that having a bigger drone would be a nice thing, as I could fly just outside of the house, so I could skip all the loading of the car which I do when I go to airfield with a plane (which needs much bigger space). That’s when I got Eachine Tyro99 – one of the cheapest race quads, which looked good enough. The build was fine for me as I’m skilled enough in soldering. But the video TX on the quad malfunctioned due to lack of moving air around it – I needed some time to figure things out while the quad was on the ground with motors off. This didn’t bother me as I wanted to fly LOS and not FPV behind the house. I was chasing my kids with it (they liked it, it was a fun game for them, not being scared of it)… until my kid decided to chase the quad instead, they headed towards me, I’ve added some speed to it so my kid wouldn’t catch it and get hurt, so I ended up with flying the quad right into my face. Around 450 grams of weight, flying fast, 4 props spinning at thousands or RPMs. It felt like getting hit in the face with a brick, some flow of the blood running down my face and hands. Yeah, that was dumb idea. So I’ve ended up in hospital, having 3 stitches on the nose. I’m glad that it didn’t poke any of my eyes out, and also glad that any of my kids didn’t get hit with it. I didn’t realize that it could end so bad, because previously I’ve been hit with the toy quad and it there was no injury from that one, but don’t make the same mistake as I did – the race quad is not a toy, weighting much more, motors much more powerful.
Yeah, I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow in the knee a quad in the face. So that was the time when I decided maybe to leave quads alone for a while – I suddenly didn’t enjoy them that much 
But later on I’ve installed The Drone Racing League Simulator to practice some more without the danger of further injury and it was fun for few weeks…
…but my progress wasn’t good enough for racing with others, so I slowly stopped doing this. But I’m considering now to get a tiny quad for interior racing (inside of my house) that would be safe even if it hits your face – some Tiny Whoop or something similar.