The mini is pretty damn quiet. At 50ft of altitude people don't hear it. AT 100ft of altitude people don't even see it.
I've flown one hundreds of times and other than other drone owners no one has ever said a thing or noticed. The drone owners notice and come over to talk drones.
Perhaps but I fly my Mini 2 regularly, and people have a hard time finding it in the sky even when I point it out to them at 100ft. At 200ft it might as well not exist. They are so small and light, they just don't put out the dBs like bigger drones.
Being able to spot a small white object in the sky and hearing it are very different things.
I put drone operators on the same level as those who hike with speakers blaring. No one is being hurt, no laws being broken. Just inconsiderate considering a large part of the experience for most in nature is the serenity.
People who hike with speakers blaring are a strange breed that I’m likely to never understand.
Like, why listen to music in the first place while hiking? I’m out here in the woods to get as far away from civilization as I can. I don’t need $latest_popstar dragging me back.
I use headphones to listen to music or audio books while hiking, walking or exercising. I enjoy it, and also a useful tool to stop mental self-talk while being able to enjoy the surrounds.
But playing music over speakers that would interrupt the tranquillity of other people trying to enjoy the quiet and space is very not cool.
Nah they definitely aren't as bad. People using speakers in public are actively choosing to annoy people when they could have used headphones. There's no headphone equivalent for drones.
Drones are also way way less common than shitty music players.
It's a question of what you got annoyed by, the point was a 100mph home built FPV drone is dramatically louder, and the way they get flown makes a lot more noise.
I've been annoyed and not talked to people too, but it was never the noise, it was blatant violation of the law flying over crowds, etc..
Definitely this. This summer a guy was flying a drone over a popular park area where lots of people were swimming in the river; it was extremely annoying. I'm pretty sure the drone was above the legal weight limit too, and as I have a UAV license, I'm well aware that it's illegal to operate a drone directly above other people. I spotted the guy with the drone controls but decided not to talk to him about it, because I couldn't be certain that someone as inconsiderate as that wouldn't necessarily react violently.
I have noticed that it really depends on the wind direction. If the wind blows from the drone towards the people, you could hear it at 50 meters. Plus, when there is a lot of wind it makes much more noise in its struggle to fight it. Otherwise, unless it is directly next to you, you can hardly hear anything.
My biggest crowd are children and pets. They always seem to be amused by the drone.
I got a proper bollocking when checking out some newly built houses with my drone, one of which I was thinking about buying. The lady thought I was trying to film her garden, probably warranted since I took off not far from her residential house. I've learned to stay further away from people while flying since, which the rules dictate anyway.
I had the same thought seeing the hero videos on this page displaying beautiful mountain scapes and vistas - I wouldn't want to be the person disturbing this space with an intrusive drone.
I read over their product page and, like always, I'm absolutely amazed that these things exist now and can capture such amazing video and photography at their price point. I'd love to get one to use.
But I won't buy one, because every time I go out now to the beach or on a hike, I see people with things like these and I just cannot stand them. I hate the ridiculous noise, I hate the fact that these people are filming things in the middle of streets and sidewalks and trails and generally putting themselves in the center of everything and inconveniencing everyone else just to 'get their shot'. I hate the idea that I am potentially being filmed by some random kids with a high speed camera on the drone hovering out over the park bench I'm resting on.
And because I hate these things, I will not buy one, because I do not want to turn into the annoyances that I feel, no matter how cool the tech looks.
That... or... I'm secretly afraid that I'd buy it and not actually have anything cool to film and it'd sit in a closet and be another $800 paperweight device.
But let's go with not wanting to be an another annoying 'Main Character Syndrome' person and just be quiet and peaceful when out and about.
Walked down the edge of canyon in Jasper National Park today and you had to wade through people taking pictures (admittedly, myself among them). What is the difference between someone taking a selfie with a phone and photos at 50 spots along the edge of the canyon, and someone flying a drone at that point?
The phone doesn't make noise, and cannot fly everywhere around in a 2km radius. The phone owner has to walk there. So if you go hiking in places where fewer people go, then you get fewer tourists. Probably you don't want to get drones there (I don't).
I do not think that there are ICE versions. But there are many different versions by now, including pump foil (just up-and-down body motion), SUP foil (with paddel), surf foil (wave), wake foil (towed behind boat, but able to let go and just surfing on the boats wave), wing foil (inflatable sail that you hold in your hand, the most popular version) and versions for kite and wind surfers. All are currently significantly cheaper than eFoil (starting around 1k compared to 5k for eFoil) but mostly more challenging, in good sense and bad sense. Some people have said that you learn how to eFoil in 30min. Then the battery is empty. But that is okay as by that time it becomes boring. Which is different to all the other foil sports (exept maybe wake) were most need ~10h to even achive small steps forward. But once you manage, basically every body of water becomes a surf spot.
A very few very selected nature parks with no-fly zones aside, most suffer more from GA with engine, cell, wing and prop designs literally dating back to 1955 (Cessna 172), than they'd ever from drones operated by responsible people.
Both fortunately and unfortunately that's not how sound works. If the drones are far enough away from each other that you don't get interference between them soundwise it doesn't matter if there are more of them. But if they do then two quiet ones may re-inforce to the point that they sound much worse than a single larger one.
It depends on: the medium, the frequency, the shape of the soundwave, how it is generated (in this case: fast rotating props) the degree to which the frequencies line up (or not) which will result in beats, the phase in case that they do line up, reflections, the distance to the source(s) from the position of the receiver, the air pressure, the direction of the wind and a ton of other factors that result in more or less noise at the receiver.
To say it doesn't behave linearly would be too nice. It's not quite random, but systems quickly become so complex (2 drones: 8 rotors!) that modeling them is non-trivial. Look at the way a steady wind blowing on water can perturb it and how complex the resulting waves are. Sound is similar, you can start off with a 'clean' source (say, an electrostatic speaker) and then you place it in a room and suddenly there are all kinds of places in the room where the sound is louder or where it almost completely disappears. Then you add a second speaker, at a little distance to the first. Put them in parallel to make it simple. Now where you place your speakers relative to each other is almost as important as the distance between the two of them. If you place both speakers so far away that the sound of an individual speaker is below the noise floor of the receiver you can usually manipulate things such that the two signals crest right at the receiver. Alternatively, you can place them so close that either one of them individually is clearly above the noise floor but placing the second one strategically to cancel out the sound of the other (besides those pesky reflections) is a possibility as well.
Sound in free space is complex, and with multiple sound sources and a complex environment it quickly gets up to a level that is probably best described as 'chaotic'.
Wikipedia is actually a pretty good source for this [0]. tl;dr it's not as simple as one drone makes X noise, so 2 drones make 2x noise. For that to happen, the drones need to be making noise at the same frequency and be perfectly in phase. Also, if they were perfectly out of phase, they could cancel the noise from each other out (this is how noise cancelling headphones work).
Yes, but it isn't uncorrelated noise. That's the whole problem here. Long articles are long for a reason, in this case that this is a complex issue. And prop noise is an ideal candidate for such interference.
At least then you know that you are being watched and recorded by some creep with a drone. It is disturbing how society tolerates these pretty-secret surveillance devices just because they can take videos that look like those documentaries on TV, yay...
