[georgemcbay]

Yet another option is to DIY. It is fairly easy to buy a flight controller, 4 ESCs, 4 motors, a radio transmitter and a LiPo battery, wire everything up and have a basic quad either on a $15-ish dollar frame you buy and assemble or something of your own creation (I design & 3D print my own frames.. makes it easy to replace parts if I crash and destroy them) and it is not much harder to add GPS to get something that's legitimately a "drone".

As someone who once owned a DJI Phantom 2 that had an unexpected flyaway (despite being fully GPS calibrated prior to every flight), I'd recommend steering away from them. Their customer service is total shit, their software is garbage (and has a long history of doing ridiculous things like deciding the battery -- which is DRMed -- inside your Phantom is fake mid-flight and crashing the device),etc

(IMO) there's a lot of piece of mind in having an open source flight controller (which doesn't eliminate the possibility of things such as this happening, but does mean you can analyze the software and see for yourself where the defects are if you do happen to see one occur).

I've been really happy with OpenPilot CC3D, APM and pixhawk flight controllers. Not really sure I'd buy another "off the shelf" quad in the near future, but if I did it would almost certainly be the 3DR Solo based on my very positive experience with their components used in my own quads.

Totally agree with the advice to start out with something like the Hubsan X4 and highly suggest learning how to fly quads 'manually' (without the GPS translation and altitude maintaining features that the high-end ones do out of the box) even if you don't plan to fly that way normally... as a backup plan, just in case.

[soylentcola]

Yeah, I've been practicing with a little $50 Syma quad I ordered on Amazon. Very basic and I had to extend the antenna on the radio transmitter because the integrated one was only a few cm long. Still, I want to get good enough with the thing and develop the instincts/muscle memory to control a quad manually and without any sort of GPS or path planning.

I figure by the time I source all of the parts to start building the little 250mm I'm planning, I'll be less likely to crash it or lose it. Might mess with something bigger and more autonomous later on but for now I'm starting small and then DIY-ing a little bigger.