SLOPING OFF...
...the Newsletter of Christchurch and District Model Flying Club for...June 2025
Getting into the world of Drones and drone photography by David Bicker
Also, a guide to flying a drone in the EU – the paperwork that you need to take with you
The Corfu Coastline
I started out playing around with little indoor drones of various shapes & sizes . I then progressed to an Ali Express “cheapie” that was marketed as having a 6K camera on it. It was a bargain for around £45 and had GPS & Return-to-Base functions plus all sorts of features, but no Collision Avoidance. It lasts 25 minutes per flight but is limited to flying in wind up to 10kph, so pretty useless on anything but a fairly calm day. Having said that, I got some good shots with it but the resolution was awful.
I did find Andrew’s fly-away Hurricane at Oldfield with it, but, as you can see, the image is really poor. (On my initial read-through, I saw “Prince Andrew’s Hurricane in a field” - the perils of skim reading! - Ed)
The only advantage that the cheapie drone has over the more expensive one is that it doesn’t have GPS geo fencing built into it. So it was able to fly at Oldfield where the better drones would get the screen blocked with a message about flying in a restricted zone due to Oldfield being within Hurn’s FRZ.
As you can see, this picture of the Paignton to Dartmouth Steam train passing behind the beach at Goodrington Sands in Devon has some nice composition features, but is totally let down by the cr*p resolution of the camera. So I decided that there was no other option than to dig deeper & lash out on a drone that basically, was better at doing everything if I wanted to get better results.
My choice of drone is the DJI Flip.
This is a strange looking beastie that folds up to look a bit like some sort of travel hair drier. It’s very compact. The package that I opted for was the DJI “Fly More” version, which gives you the drone, an RC2 transmitter with a large quality screen built-in, 3 batteries, a 4 battery charging station (minus the power supply!), a nice padded carry case with a shoulder strap and on an Easter offer, there was a very useful fairly large padded rucksack thrown in, too.
I had to pay an additional £31 for a superfast rated 256gb micro SD card. DJI only specified / recommended 2 types of card for use with this drone . I opted for the Lexar Professional 1066x 256GB A2 V30 SDXC1 Card. Initially in first use, the recommended card came up with slow card warnings on the TX display. After a bit of head scratching & no help from DJI literature, a web search revealed that card formatting defaults it to Ex FAT, 32kb. This needs to be changed to Ex FAT 32,768kb. This allows larger blocks of video to be recorded, giving a smoother playback. The low speed card error message then disappeared.
I also had to buy a USB-C Type 65W Charger to run the charging station.
By the end of that little list the bill had reached around £700.
The drone’s flight batteries last 31 minutes in ideal conditions, but with anything other than hovering, it’s more realistic to say it’s 25 minutes. My average flight duration has been 10-15 minutes.
The drone can be controlled with the TX, a mobile phone (slightly less functionality), or no controller at all! You can open up the drone & press a button on the side a few times, cycling through pre-programmed flight modes. It just counts down (built-in speaker) & takes off from your hand to perform your chosen mode.
The youngsters in our family love it being set to “Follow Me”. It takes off & then obediently follows them around at a controlled distance while they hair around the garden trying to get away from it. If they duck under a low branch, the drone stops about a foot away from it (collision avoidance) until they move sideways a bit, when it re-routes around the obstacle. It did a great job of following them around tree trunks, taking the same route that they did. At the end of the flight you extend your arm out towards the camera & underneath the drone & it lands on your hand & shuts down. Quite a party trick. Interestingly, we couldn’t “pass” the drone to another person to get it to follow them. Once the AI subject tracking has latched onto one person’s features it won’t switch to following another person during that flight.
It’s what’s described as a Vlogging (video logging) drone. You can get it to circle you as you walk along, to climb in a spiral whilst filming downwards, follow behind you etc. All aimed at internet blogging/vlogging people. I want it for scenery shots mostly, to get a different perspective, not for social media.
On another early flight I thought that I’d test out its FRZ detection function. So I took it up to Win Green & filmed some off-roaders passing the northeast bowl (with their permission).
After they had passed by I flew the drone around towards the NW bowl. About half way there a big splash screen came up warning that I was entering a restricted zone. You had to tick a box & agree to take responsibility before it gave you back the screen to back out of the edge of the FRZ. So that worked!
The spec is as follows:
Foldable Full-Coverage Propeller Guard
Under 249 g
AI Subject Tracking (people only)
1/1.3-inch CMOS Sensor & Hasselblad lense
4K/60fps HDR Video
31-Min Max Flight Time
Collision avoidance function (forwards facing only)
Max speed 20mph
What it doesn’t have that more expensive models do:
Collision avoidance on all sides
The ability to lock onto a moving bike or car
Longer battery life at 40 minutes
40mph max speed
To get those you need to spend an additional £300.
Here’s a link to the website that shows videos of what it can do.
Having taken the plunge and bought a better quality, more expensive drone, I really wanted to take it with me on holiday in the EU as it has an excellent gimbal-mounted Hasselblad camera fitted to it.
What most internet comments don’t mention is that you can fly a drone under 250g with almost no restrictions, no insurance & no Operator ID. BUT …. If it has a camera you need to treat it as having the same rules & restrictions as a model or drone that weighs over 250g. Taking the 40 questions test for a UK Operator ID and getting insurance are required.
So, with CAA registration, insurance, a User ID & an Operator ID and the Op ID number plastered on the model / drone, all is well in the UK.
Now try taking it abroad with you….
The CAA Operator ID doesn’t pass muster for the EU, nor does the UK insurance package. So the solution is to register to fly under the EU rules by registering yourself in an EU country as well as the UK. The next bit of common sense is to choose a country that has English as its native language to simplify the paperwork.
Having got that far, I decided to get my Operator ID through the Irish IAA. Now, if I remember rightly, the CAA charge for it was £12-ish.
Well, you’re in for a shock because to get the IAA equivalent you have to create a login to their portal & get that verified first. Being Irish, what they wanted wasn’t what they asked for on the form. It said that you had to state the place that you were born. I did that – Bournemouth. But the system spat that out because it didn’t match the address on my driver’s license. In the end I changed my place of birth to match the driving license (current) home address & it then accepted it!
Next you have to sit through an hour long EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency) training video (compulsory). After that you have to pay them 50€ for a certificate of proof that you have watched the video and passed the 40 question exam. Then you have to pay them 40€ for the Operator ID.
Now that’s done, you need either world or EU coverage insurance. I had already paid for the DJI care package that covers fly-aways & damage repairs, but not theft.
My new worldwide drone insurance policy was needed as it covered theft – but also covered fly-aways!
Finally, you need to be carrying the invoice for purchasing the drone so that they can’t charge you tax on it at customs.
As an aside, if you are driving in the EU, you also need an IDP (International Driving Permit), which is a fiver in the UK, or 70€ if you forgot it & have to apply for it in the country that you are visiting (in my case, Corfu). Just to add to our woes when we went to hire the car, I found out that Lloyds Bank had put a stop on my credit card due to a fraudulent transaction that they had stopped & forgotten to notify me about. So I was abroad with a dead credit card. So we had to add my wife to the car hire deal so that her credit card could be used as excess damage security on the hire. That cost another 30€. Also, the maximum car hiring age (in Corfu/Greece) was 75 years old. An elderly couple from Hengistbury Head area got caught out by that, so we chauffeured them around favourite haunts. Otherwise they would have had a pretty boring holiday. The local bus fare for the 10 miles trip to Corfu town from the hotel on the Pantokrator mountain range was only 2.20€, but they got stung for a return taxi trip that cost them 40€. They were good company too.
As it was, we never got asked for the IDP & the hire company wasn’t bothered about it. We returned the car without any damage, so the credit card registered with them wasn’t used either.
But, having got all of that sorted, the drone got used a lot & produced some stunning results.
If you want to see some of the output, I’ve posted some of the videos on my Youtube account. Here’s a link to one.
https://youtu.be/BkmnZxJr0Wc and another, up the River Stour near Wimborne https://youtu.be/W7WrGS5CmVY
The quality has been reduced to make the file sizes smaller. The drone took footage in 3 formats. Standard MP4 video & 48mp stills, plus a DJI format called D-Log M, where the video resolution goes from 16 million colours to 1 billion colours, but needs post-processing to get the final result. I filmed in both & I’ve uploaded the reduced file size standard MP4 videos to Youtube. I hope that you like them!
David Bicker