LKTR 120

Introduction:

I've played with many toy grade quads before, but this was the first non toy grade quad that I configured myself. Notice that I said "configured" and not "built". I picked this up used from someone looking to get rid of it and planned on flying it around the house.

Components:

• 4x DP03 3.5g brushless outrunner (not sure of the kv)
• 4x esc (not sure of amps)
• LKTR 120 frame
• Oversky Scisky naze 32 FC with built in DSM2 receiver
• BEC for FPV camera

Conclusion:

The LKTR120 came right before the surge in popularity of micro brushless quads. This was a simple, light, and effective build and it really showed during my first flight. There was ample power even though I used a larger 2s 400mah battery. Before this, I had an arducopter sitting on my shelf for the longest time that I never got around to configuring, but this little thing was so captivating that I wanted to spend some time setting it up and trying it out right away.

As I said, this was my first time setting up a quad (hooking up the flight controller to the computer, flashing it, and configuring it to a tx). Baseflight was initially set up on the flight controller, and I tried to use it only to find the options severely limiting. Even binding it to my DX6I transmitter took a long time since I had to play around with the configuration before I found out I had to enable the serial TX option. After a couple of days, I flashed it over to cleanflight and everything became easier.

As with all quads, flight times cannot compare to planes. You can build a really efficient plane that can give you a half hour or more of flight time with one battery. Good luck getting anywhere close to that with a quad... During the first outdoor flight, I underestimated the power and lost it in some bushes behind my house. It took me a couple hours to find it (with my wife's help...lol). I have a camera that I haven't hooked up to it yet since I'm trying to learn how to fly rate mode using only line of sight first.

Overall, the quad is great, but the DX6I transmitter is a real choke point. I already bought another half built quad that I plan on working on next. Since that one is larger, I'll be using it on a Taranis transmitter with telemetry. Using a more modern transmitter with quads will also allow me more configuration options in betaflight which I plan on switching over to. To sum it up, the learning curve when it comes to planes is in aerodynamics, but the learning curve when it comes to quads is in the technology. If you have experience scratch building planes, then building a quad is not much harder (just more of the same), but configuring it is going to be more of a challenge. I haven't even gotten around to tuning the PIDs yet.