In the summer, grass are tall and everywhere, it’s hard to find a flat, clear spot where you can take off without obstructing the propellers. With the help this take-off/landing pad it’s made my life easier.
I got the drone pad from Flathat.
Flathat offers 2 drone pad sizes, 40cm and 80cm (diameter). I went for 40cm as I normally fly mini quads, the bigger one is for DJI and other larger aircrafts. The best feature of this take-off/landing pad is being collapsible.
The pad can be folded and fit into a 16cm (diameter) bag, and it only weights 100g. It makes it really easy to carry around. The material is durable, heavy duty fabric.
One important aspect that is missing from this take off pad is the holes for ground stakes: on a windy day it can easily get blown away. I know these are included in the 32″ version, but they should have done the same for the smaller version too.
One accessory that you can get with the drone pad is this lighting kit. It’s designed to fit around the edge of the pad. It’s made from electroluminescent wire, so it runs cool and consume very little power, and it can run for quite a long time.
It’s powered by 2x AA batteries. The length of the lighting strip is about 2.55m (it fits the perimeter of the 32″ drone pad). However, it’s not very bright, and you can hardly see the light during the day.
It’s really designed for low light uses. Probably not something you should buy if you don’t fly at night.
Picture from Flathat website
The sleeves on the drone pad are a bit too small, making the removal of lighting wire very difficult.
Overall it’s quite a pricey product for what what it does: sit your drone/multirotor on it when you take off or land. You can probably do the same thing with a piece of cardboard.
But, it’s made of quality material, so it should last a lot longer than cardboard as it doesn’t care getting wet. And I have to say it’s pretty convenient to carry in my backpack with my mini quads. It’s a handy tool if you have $20 to spare.
1 comment
Sometimes it’s good to have clear place to land/take off. There’s one big and nice open meadow near my location, but it has a catch – people are bringing their dogs there. And the dogs are leaving, how to put this, traces :D So once I landed FPV, not to the exact spot where I took off and guess who had to disassemble the whole quad just to wash the dog poo from every hole on the back plate and PDB :D It was nasty. So yeah, sometime you need to have a proper place to land or take off :)