Reminiscing my old hobby of building & flying RC planes & drones

With work & other responsibilities now taking most of my time, I am unfortunately not very active in this hobby but hope to carve out time for it.

BHPian NerdyMillennial recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

I have been building and flying RC planes and drones since 2013. I started off with an RTF 4ch glider (powered) made out of foam, Sky Surfer from RcBazaar. Highly, highly recommend something like this if you have never flown before. From that, I moved to building planes out of depron sheets since you get a lot of free plans for the same on the internet (most are designed to be made from either 3mm, 5mm, or 6mm depron sheets which are easily available in India as well).

While Futaba's and Hiteks are great premium radios, they come with a lot of struggles because of being a closed ecosystem. Their receivers are very expensive, availability in India is very limited etc. I would recommend you take a good hard look at the TX16s from Radiomaster. They have two variants of that radio, one has a 4-on-1 module that can basically work with 4 different brand and protocol receivers and the other variant has an ELRS module. Both of these radios come with an extra RF module bay so you can put any protocol module in that and it'll work. Do not be fooled by its cheap (when compared to futaba) price. The community for these radios is also very active on the internet. I am using the FrSky Taranis X9D since 2015 now and am very happy with the radio for the most part. Though the bug to upgrade to the TX16s is biting me even though I am not flying as much lately.

With work and other responsibilities now taking most of my time, I am unfortunately not very active in this hobby but hope to carve out time for these again since they are so satisfying and you are constantly learning something. Attaching some pictures from those good old teenage days!

Learnt to fly on this Sky Surfer.

It is as much fun to build these machines as it is to fly them.

Build complete and ready to fly!

Such models are fun to build and learn the basics of flight. You can play with them in your room and apply what you've learned back out in the field.

Practising on the simulator before going crazy on the field with your beloved plane.

Started out with kk 2.0 board and kept upgrading this 650-size quad till it had fully autonomous flight capabilities using the initial Ardupilot boards which were based on Arduino Mega along with a stabilised GoPro. This was years before we had all these drone laws.

Are you even a teenager if you don't put LEDs on absolutely everything?

RCPowers F35.

I and my friend even designed and built this model which had the fuselage made from depron and the wing with laser cut balsa for the Techfest at IIT Mumbai.

This PT20 Ryan is still the most beautiful RC plane I own.

Feel free to contact me if you want any help whatsoever. It is a rare hobby so it's always fun to interact with people, newbies or veterans alike.

Happy landings!

Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.