How did you end up owning a phantom?

[Doink]

My story,

An ex neighbour got one for Christmas from his wife, an xk detect 380c nothing special or expensive, it got me hooked and had to have one so I set my budget at £300 and started looking, I settled on a parrot ar 2.0 at £285 from amazon, this is where it all went pear shaped, the first delivery never arrived due to courier heading back to depot with my drone unable to deliver saying there was no answer even though I was sat waiting and tracking the parcel, after much complaing Amazon apologised and asked for another chance and agreed a partial refund on a previous purchase which I duly used to upgrade the drone to the GPS version, second delivery was successful but upon removing the box from the couriers plastic packaging it became apparent that the box look bashed about and second hand, I carried on opening only to find the drone was not the GPS version even though the box showed it was, someone somewhere had swapped things about, needless to say I wasn't happy and after more complaints to amazon got a full refund but that took 3 weeks.

By this time I'd seen the parrot bebop v1 and decided for a better drone I needed to up my budget. While all this was happening the wife was starting to feel sorry for me so behind my back she went and bought a 1 month old bebop from gumtree, bought early December but the owner decided it wasn't for him, he sold it to her for £450 despite paying £799 not 3 weeks earlier, he even gave the wife the receipt from maplins in case of any problems.

After charging the batteries it came to flying the bebop, what a joke this was no matter how long I waited it would not get satellite lock, after much googling it appeared it was a common issue and the advice was to leave the drone powered up on the patio to find satellite signal in its own time, from then on it should find satellites quicker, well 3hrs one Saturday afternoon with it sat on my patio unable to find any satellites convinced me this wasn't for me, I just wanted to plug and play.

So this is where it started to turn in my favour, took the drone back to my local maplins not the one where it was originally purchased from, got the original box and the receipt but was still expecting maplins to put up a fight but no, the took it back no questions under their Christmas gift refund policy and refunded me on a card of my choice because they didn't have £800 in their till, check this - I just bought a drone for £450 and took it back and got £799 back wtf!!!

By this time my neighbour was giving it the big un like 'you should of just bought one like mine' etc etc, bearing in mind by this time he'd already crashed his and smashed his gimbal off I decided I wasn't messing around anymore and I just wanted a drone to fly.......I just want to fly with no problems, so with £800 burning a hole in my pocket there was only one choice and I chose my P3A and so far have not looked back while my neighbours xk has since been crashed again twice and thrown in the bin.

Well that's my story, from a £285 parrot which I never actually took delivery of to a £700 work of art, I'm so glad that courier driver never came lol!

 

[b0dyr0ck2006]

It all started with those cheap indoor helicopters for me, £25 for a bit of fun and messing about. Although this gave me the bug without realising. After killing four of these I decided to upgrade a touch and bought a mini copter to mess about with in the garden but this didn't quench my thirst, at this point my mate had shown me the phantom 1 and it looked great but I didn't have the money for it so I stuck with copters. Another upgrade came along and I started flying coaxial, the fixed then collective. Getting bigger and bigger and more and more expensive. Eventually I bit the bullet and moved away from copters and bought my first drone, the P3A and have been hooked since

 

[LongDono]

Great stories!

I'd previously played around with a $30 nano drone, one which I could only keep in the air for 5-10 seconds at a time before crashing it into something. Not very stable.

About 4 weeks ago I was sort of eyeing the P3 Standard, as I wasn't looking to invest quite so much money. My father is getting older and was diagnosed with something and I thought it would be a good time to get footage of the rural area around my parents place, to give them views they may have never or rarely seen before, while there is still time to do that.

I was watching an ebay auction for a new in box P3 Professional that was located in Canada and the high bidder seemed to be hanging on in the last 60 seconds with a price that seemed too low. I decided that there was no way they should get it for that low a price, so with only 10 seconds left in the auction, and fully expecting only to cause them to pay more, I put in a $25 higher bid.

Well, after clicking Bid, I was informed I was the high bidder and as I watched the last 3 seconds click away, that was replaced with a page telling me that I'd won! Whoops.

"Do I really want to own a UAV," I immediately asked myself, looking at the ebay status page.

"Doesn't matter, you own one now!," I replied, answered my own question.

As a result of the lower price and not having to pay tax, compared to my local big box retailers (who only have it available online), I saved between $423 to $537. I then purchased the spoils from someone who'd had crashed his Phantom, and saved another $565 to $694.

I actually created a spreadsheet to illustrate how much I'd saved, in order to feel better about the total amount (and climbing) spent. This way I can still have a cool Phantom and yet somehow still appear somewhat wise with money among friends and family.


...Donovan

 

[rdandy5875]

Alright I'll go.
This is the short version
Good amount or RC experience here, Blade Micro collective pitch Helis the past couple years.

With all my blade helis in varous levels of disarray, I wanted to get into a 4 rotor instead of spending the money fixing my helicopters. Over the winter, I was looking to get a FPV racing drone, but hesitant to pull the trigger on my budget. I knew of the Phantom Drones also, but I wanted something that was dedicated FPV, also didn't want to plunk down $500 for the Std. I knew there was high latency on the video feed, and the Advanced was about 2X over my budget.

I follow a couple people on Youtube, and one day around maybe January, this guy I follow picked up a P3S from Target for the Clearance price of $350, and followed that up with more Target's @ $199 OMG. It was all over slickdeals, etc, but my local Targets never participated. I kept checking my local Target every morning before work (I go there for snacks and breakfast food before work anyways), and was lucky enough to find one that was an online order/return (never opened), @ the clearance price of $350. Super happy to get it for that price, but once I flew it a couple times I wanted more.

So I sold the Standard while it was still in New condition @ 6 successful flights (before the inevitable), on craigslist, and was lucky enough to find a great deal on a sealed P3A from a private seller. It flies great and I could not be happier.

Best of luck everyone, Happy flying, and Safe landings...

 

[PEEFA]

I was in bed one Sunday morning decided I was going to go to maplins for some resistors for my other hobby. I checked online to see what time they shut and that's when I saw the p3a on sale at £699 bingo put it on reserve and straight down to get it lol


Sent from my iPhone using PhantomPilots mobile app

 

[Zeprider]

I was once out strolling one very hot summer's day when I thought I'd lay myself down to rest in a big field of tall grass...

Seriously, it started with those Syma toys. The X5C to be exact. It then morphed into an F1, and that's when I realized that I wanted to get back into RC like I did years ago. I walked into my LHS and BOOM! All of those beautiful white Phantom boxes were on display. That my friends is an irresistible sight.

I started doing my homework and invested time and money to become part of the family.