Welcome DJI Spark Pilot!
Jump in and join our free Spark community today!
Sign up

Spark and a Speedboat

Bigplumbs

New Member
Join
Jun 24, 2017
Messages
3
Age
61
Hello all.

I am new here but I fly many sorts of RC Aircraft including jets and Quadcopters. I have a DJI Phantom, Hex and Quad as well as other drones.

My other hobby is speed boats and I wanted a drone that is small and compact to take follow me video in my boat. The sort of speeds I would get up to is about 30 mph.

I was wondering if people felt the Spark would be a good drone for this usage

Many thanks

Dennis
 
Hello all.

I am new here but I fly many sorts of RC Aircraft including jets and Quadcopters. I have a DJI Phantom, Hex and Quad as well as other drones.

My other hobby is speed boats and I wanted a drone that is small and compact to take follow me video in my boat. The sort of speeds I would get up to is about 30 mph.

I was wondering if people felt the Spark would be a good drone for this usage

Many thanks

Dennis
Negative...the Spark would have to be in Sport Mode in order to keep up with you and no real features are available while in Sport mode. Not even sure if the Mavic can do this. 30 MPH is quite fast for Active Track to work
 
Negative...the Spark would have to be in Sport Mode in order to keep up with you and no real features are available while in Sport mode. Not even sure if the Mavic can do this. 30 MPH is quite fast for Active Track to work

That was my fear. I still think it could beused for slower vids that would look nice and altogether a small set up when in a smallish boat

Dennis
 
While the Spark can reach 31 MPH in Sport mode, you're not going to get good video since the camera will be very unstable when doing any kind of maneuvers that do not involve flying in a straight line (since the gimbal auto switches to FPV mode). When flying in P mode, the Spark will only be able to reach 14 MPH (or slightly more if the wind is pushing it). You'll want to fly in P mode since the quality of the video is important.

How about the Mavic? That seems to be the best fit for this purpose since it's the next smallest DJI drone.
 
I recently was using Active Track on my Mavic to track a jetski and had mixed results. I was able to track it up to about 35 mph but would lose the connection if there was quick movement when the subject was close. I found that success depended on how fast the subject was moving across the screen independent of how fast it was actually traveling. As long as the subject was roughly the same size on the screen as when you looked it in Active Track and didn't move too quickly across the frame it would successfully track the subject.
 
A Mavic would work but not with Active Track. In the old days of DJI you could have a Phantom track your controller as long as your Phone or Tablet attached to your controller had a GPS chip.

I believe the Mavic Pro still has this Follow Me function available. You can go pretty fast but the only draw back is that the drone follows you but not necessarily the camera follows you or keeps you in frame. You have to sit in the back of the boat and control the camera.
 
Mavic is way over priced in my view and not nearly as small
Keep your speed boat until 14 MPH and the Spark will do just fine then ;)
 

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
14,593
Messages
118,799
Members
17,987
Latest member
csdisme