Looking to fly FPV over an unlimited range but with HD video? The Sky Drone FPV 2 may be your product.
Typically, FPV flyers have to make a tradeoff. They’ll either get low video quality, interference issues with other radio equipment, or the need for a large tracking antenna to achieve long range flights. Or, if they have a digital video, they’ll have a higher quality video but lower latency and aren’t suitable for real time video transfer.
Sky Drone FPV is changing that.
It uses 4G/LTE mobile networks to connect the camera to a ground station app, which receives and displays a video stream. Such transmission is low-latency with less than 150ms of end-to-end latency and can provide HD quality even over hundreds of kilometers of distances. At the same time, a bi- directional data / telemetry channel, allows to pass information like MAVLink from the drone to a groundstation (e.g. QGroundControl) and even back to the drone from a groundstation.
The company started as an Indiegogo campaign in 2013, with units shipping earlier this year. While it never initially met its funding goal, its backers included CEO of 3D Robotics Chris Anderson and o-Founder of DroneDeploy Mike Winn.
This is now the second version of the Sky Drone FPV.
Sky Drone FPV 2 costs $699, is available worldwide and comes in two versions: a Europe/Asia and a U.S. version.