Inaugural flight with a Holy Stone HS720R drone.

The drone is a Holy Stone HS720R which has a 4K 30fps camera mounted on its own 3 axis gimbal. It has approximately 25 minutes flight time off one battery and can carry a 256GB storage card. They retail at £350 on Amazon UK but are often on discount offer. I was extremely fortunate to spot a 50% discount which is why I snapped it up.

After reading the manual properly this time I realised that last weeks initialisation problems were nothing to do with the GPS. I was actually trying to calibrate the magnetic compass (which is part of the GPS unit on most drones) and to do this you need to rotate the drone horizontally 3 times, then vertically 3 times. Last week I was cartwheeling the drone when vertical instead of rotating it around its vertical axis. After doing it properly, the drone calibrated immediately and had a good signal from 17 different GPS satellites.

"Flight test" days weather was extremely blustery and threatening rain so I nearly did not fly. However it did calm down slightly as I turned to go back the the car so I decided to take a risk. Being in a small valley I decided to keep the drone below the tree line so any "fly aways" would not go far. The drones "learner" mode was also engaged so it should not go further than 15m in any direction if calibrated correctly.

In the event the drone was extremely easy for a learner to fly and remained a stable camera platform even in the gusts of wind. As can be seen from the video the focus is only lost when I deliberately spin the drone to test the imaging. It is going to be fun getting some exciting images with this in the future.