Mikrokopter Hexa 2 at York College Test Flight

So, I bought a Mikrokopter Hexa 2 kit from Mikrokopter.us a while back.

If you never heard of Mikrokopter, they're a German company, www.mikrokopter.de, who make excellent quadcopters, hexacopters and octocopters. They are also pretty expensive, so buying one of their models is quite a big deal for most people - including me.

You can buy them pretty much fully built and ready to fly, but I thought I would save some money and buy mine in kit form - which is why I've had it for a month before taking this first test flight.

I had a little try with it before this to make sure it works, which it does thanks to help from Geoff at quadcopters.co.uk, but this was my first proper test flight.

The only reason I filmed the college was because it has a field next to it and I never tried flying there before.

For my Mikrokopter Hexa 2 aerial video test flight I wanted to experiment with how it behaves at different heights, see how high I could comfortably go with it and see if it would carry a camcorder and fly smoothly. I also wanted to get an idea of how long it would fly while carrying a camcorder (about 300 grams) with the supplied 3000mah 4 cell lipo battery.

The first thing you notice is how smooth and steady the hexacopter is - pretty much the only time it wobbles is when I'm making it wobble with the stick, if I let go of the controls it seems rock solid in the air.

You can also be very precise with where you want it to go - as well as going very high then moving it forwards and backwards sharply, I also managed to get very close to some floodlights near the beginning of the video, and a fence and low roof nearer to the end, all without fear of hitting anything or any erratic movements.

While it did carry the camcorder I don't really like the quality of the images from this particular model, a Panasonic HDC-SD9 3CCD. I bought this a while back on eBay because I wanted to own a camera with  a 3CCD censor instead of the more prevalent CMOS censor because CCD sensors do not suffer from the warp effect you get from vibrations due to the rolling shutter. The picture is nice and stable with the Panasonic HDC-SD9, but I hate the garish colours it produces. I may try and fiddle with the settings a bit, but I think I'm more likely to return to using the GoPro or Kodak Playsport.

The video is a bit of an ambling affair because I was just sort of fooling around with no objective other than flight testing and seeing how long the battery would last. I left the entire video in, unedited, so people can see how long it flies with a camcorder and pan tilt camera mount attached (about 350 to 400 grams payload). There is a buzzer that sounds when the battery is getting low, which was just starting to happen with extreme throttle so it probably had a couple of minutes flight left in it. Of course you don't really want to run the battery completely flat because it is said that it shortens the life of the battery if you do this - and the flat-design 4 cell Mikrokopter batteries are pretty expensive. You could in theory buy cheaper 4 cell batteries, but they would be difficult to fit because they are usually too fat. I suppose it's just like expensive cars, where the parts get more expensive as you scale up to fancier models.

I haven't fitted and LED light strips to the underside of the arms yet, but I think I will as they aid visual orientation which can be very difficult even on quadcopters, and even harder with a hexacopter that appears almost circular from below with its six arms and propellers.

In the future I will by the Navi board and GPS systems for it which will add some brilliant functions such as Return to Home, Position Hold and Programmable Waypoints using a laptop. So lots of fun to be had with this machine I think. I am very pleased with it and Geoff tells me there are even more tweaks I can do to make it even smoother.