Halo

Introduction:

This was one of the quads I was really excited to be testing out. The rakonheli frames are a bit pricey for what you get, but the quality is suppose to be amazing, so I snapped up a used one that needed to be fixed up for a good price.

Components:

• Rakonheli 66mm brushless whoop frame
• 4x racerstar 0703 15000kv motors with king kong whoop props
• Teeny 1s 4in1 ESC
• Omnibus F3 FC
• Frsky XM+ receiver
• LST S2 AIO camera/vtx

Conclusion:

The quad came with a strut damaged in one of the ducts along with some really noisy motors and a damaged pad on the FC. I used some amazing goop and heat shrink to repair the duct and it came out super strong. I remapped the FC receiver pin and then added a drop of machine oil to each motor. The noisy motors became great motors again...almost as quiet as coreless ones. I could have saved a few grams by not using the XM+, but have been getting such great results with it that I didn't want to try anything else. This is mainly for indoors, but I can easily fly through all the levels of m house with no issues using the XM+. The LST S2 camera is still my favorite for indoors when it comes to value cameras. The total weight came to 28g.

So far, I like this quad a lot, but also have some reservations about it. The frame is great and can take a lot of abuse. I tried various batteries and settled on some eachine 500mah batteries that gives me a little more than 3 mins of flight time. The smaller ones tend to give out after 1 min. Maybe once every ten flights or so, I'll have some issues with video noise, but most of the time it is under control and not worth it for me to put in a LC filter and tack on some more weight. I didn't want to use the original battery holders since I can't see how the 220mah batteries can last more than a minute before sagging. By using a rubber band and some silicone padding, I can use any sized battery I want. I'm probably going to try some of my GNB 450 batteries on this next. The main reservations I have about this and other 1s brushless quads is that they are fairly inefficient fliers. Smaller 200mah sized batteries are ideal, but they sag way too soon. Due to the increased weight, they still do not handle as nicely as the coreless brushed whoop style quads. I'd like to try the 76mm versions next as I believe the increased prop size will make them a lot more efficient.

Update 5/30/18: Had to replace motor 1 today. I don't think the crash was any harder than the usual ones, but part of the winding must have broke.

Update 6/21/18: Turtle mode works on this now. As I found out from flying the Armattan Bumper, the thing preventing turtle mode from having enough power to flip the quad over was simply that I was flying with low rates. Also, the video noise turned out to be some sort of electrical interferrence with some of the lighting in my house (appears and disappears with the flick of a switch - go figure). The quad also developed a slight wobble during flights after a while which I found out was caused by the props being bent ever so slightly out of shape after numerous crashes. These small props are very sensitive to that unlike the larger ones.