FPV Racing Quad Practice Crashes - How to Find A Lost Quad

Two crashes in one day

Yesterday I crashed my Vortex twice and had a blast!  I have hardly crashed at all in many years of flying FPV and I have not had a pilot mistake crash ever - until yesterday!  I tried a roll, no problem.  Then I tried a front flip and before I could blink I was laying upside down in the grass.  I knew immediately what I did wrong.  If you do not pull the throttle when you are upside down you will go down incredibly fast because of gravity combined with the crazy power of these tiny powerful, 4 cell powered motors.  The other crash happened because I was flying on an incline and got below the spot I was standing, out of visual range.   It is amazing how fast the signal drops out when the earth gets in the way. The signal went from clear to static instantly.  This type of crash has happened to me once before with an airplane when I was flying it on the side of the crater here in Maui, it dropped out of line of sight and just went link dead.  This is one of the biggest problems with 5.8ghz video links, they just die when something gets in the way.  

I have been trying to avoid flying over cane fields because if I crash my little quad I know it will be hard to find.  Today I was flying over a newly planted field and so I figured it would be easy to find.  I got lucky and found it quickly but I was really worried about a 2 hour search and recovery mission that could easily happen.  When the video went out on the second crash, I was really worried that it might take awhile to find but it was laying right on the road.  The whole time I was thinking it sure would be nice to have a Tile on this thing to help me locate it!  Luckily I have a few extra ones laying around.

Finding a lost quad with Tile

Tile: The $20 Drone Locator

Both times I crashed I thought I could be in for a long search and each time I went out to look for it I wish I had stuck a Tile on the copter.  A "Tile" is basically a little bluetooth beacon that you link to your phone.  When you get within range of it, you can make it start beeping.  Normal people use them to find their keys (I use them for this about once a week!) but us drone nerds can use them to locate lost racing copters in cane fields!  They are about $20 - $25 bucks from Amazon and they last over a year.  I am sticking one on my Vortex before I fly it again!

---