Hubsan has established itself as a reputed name in the drone industry, with a myriad of interesting drones available. One of my first quads was a Hubsan X4, and I had an absolute blast learning to fly it. Fast forward several years and Hubsan has released an affordable GPS drone with Follow Me, Return to Home, Altitude Hold, onboard 1080p camera, and a FPV screen on the transmitter, all in the H501S (https://tinyurl.com/ju39hre).
Courtesy of Gearbest, I tried out the Advanced version of the H501S. It's a stellar drone, with a ton of potential, in terms of range and power. Check out my full video review here:
I spent a lot of time trying out different action cameras mounted onto the H501s. For this, a simple credit card mount with velcro was sufficient, although a GoPro-style bracket mount also worked well. You can see just sample footage from the H501S using GitUp2 and Firefly 7S, along with the stock camera, here:
Likes:
- Drone design is fluid, awesome lines and sleek appearance. Fairly compact too, easy to fit in a hiking backpack.
- Controller is powerful, yet not overwhelming. Instruction manual is pretty good at walking you through the first flight, and the switches are labeled fairly logically. FPV screen on the controller is awesome!
- Stable flight under GPS control, and return home seems to work quite well, very accurate
- Onboard camera, while not as good as action camera, is actually pretty decent!
- Very reasonable price for a powerful, GPS quadcopter with advanced options like Follow Me
Dislikes:
- Intermittent range issues. Horizontal range at times limited compared to vertical range. From my discussion with other users online, this is a known issue in a few of the models, fixed with an antenna correction. Refer to this thread on RCGroups.
- Lack of image stabilization. This isn't too hard to correct using post-processing (YouTube stabilization, or Sony Vegas Pro stabilization)
Links:
Purchase Hubsan H501S online: https://tinyurl.com/ju39hre
