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The use of drones, both fixed-wing and rotary-wing, are becoming almost commonplace in wildlife research, or at least that would seem to be the case for anyone watching PBS or searching the subject on Youtube. But professional use drones are very expensive and have debatable usefulness, especially in heavily forested study areas. The equipment necessary to make drones useful in tracking and research add an additional layer of high costs and complexity for their use by most researchers.

So I debated whether this page should be included in this web site.

This is the drone out-of-the-box before assembly and modifications. The original price was $200 before Christmas, but this one was purchased new for $50 after Christmas with free shipping.

This is what the drone looked like after necessary modifications for use around trees and wires, and the addition of the platform for the attachment of various types of equipment. One of these was a 5.6ghz radar unit which sounds an alarm if the drone flys too close (adjustable for range) to trees or other obsticles

The purpose of the drone in this study is to aid the radio telemetry, not to replace it, and in aerial photography

This drone came equiped with a WIFI camera to stream POV photos in-flight, but also served to transmit flight data back to a smartphone equiped operator.

The range of the camera tranmitter was advertized to be about 800 feet, but experience showed that even under the best conditions, only about half of that range was obtainable.

So the camera was removed in favour of a vibration damped equpment platform that had flexible use in mounting many types of equipment.

This drone had a payload lifting weight of about and could fly for about 10 minutes on a fully charged battery with a full payload, as long as the flying style was not too aggressive. A countdown timer with alarm mounted o the control box gives a good approximation of remaining flight time. The drone has the ability it return to it's starting point (home) on it's own, but only if the battery has enough charge remaining.