Guides, by subject
Twenty-five guides, grouped by the question that sends you looking for them, plus three holiday gift guides.
Researched from published specifications and verified owner reviews · updated 2026
The short answer
This hub indexes twenty-five drone guides in five groups: rules and paperwork, flying and field discipline, camera and battery technique, commercial workflows, and FPV building. A new recreational pilot should read the TRUST guide, the preflight checklist and the LAANC guide first, in that order, because those three cover the legal and safety ground before the first flight.
Guides on this site cover procedure: how a thing is done, why it works that way, and what goes wrong when it is done differently. That makes them different from the gear roundups, which compare products, and from the reference charts, which are lookup tables you check without reading. Several topics have both, because understanding shutter angle and remembering which ND to fit in bright sun are two different needs.
ASA
ASA Standard UAS Operator Logbook
Paper logbook, flight and maintenance
A flight log is not required for Part 107 and every commercial client, insurer and eventual dispute asks for one anyway. Starting a log on flight one costs fourteen dollars. Reconstructing a year of flying from memory and photo timestamps costs a weekend and is not defensible.
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Rules and paperwork
In the United States what you are allowed to do depends on why you are flying, what the aircraft weighs, whether it broadcasts Remote ID, and whose airspace you are standing under. None of that is complicated once it is laid out in order, and all of it is expensive to get wrong. These six guides cover the whole sequence, and the rules hub arranges them as a single path from nothing to legally airborne.
TRUST test for recreational flyers
Free, unfailable, and permanently gone the moment you lose the certificate. How to take it and how not to lose it.
Open →How to register a drone
One weight threshold, one website, and a registration number that has to physically live on the airframe.
Open →Remote ID explained
A digital licence plate for the aircraft, and the three legal paths to carrying one.
Open →LAANC airspace authorization
The fast path into controlled airspace, and the slow path for everything the fast path will not cover.
Open →Reading a sectional chart
The chart Part 107 tests you on, translated for someone who has never opened one.
Open →Drone insurance explained
Not required for most recreational flying, and still the cheapest protection against one bad afternoon.
Open →Flying and field discipline
Almost every first-year loss traces back to one of four things: a battery flown too low, a compass that was never calibrated after a location change, wind that was stronger at altitude than at head height, and a home point set in the wrong place. All four are prevented on the ground. The habits are cheap and the failures are not.
An BTMETER BT-100 handheld anemometer ($33) is the single item that turns the wind half of that list from a guess into a reading, and it costs less than one propeller set on most aircraft. Ground wind is not wind at altitude, but it anchors the estimate, and the wind and airspeed margin calculator turns that reading into a go or no-go.
Drone preflight checklist
Catching problems on the ground, where they are an inconvenience, rather than in the air, where they are not.
Open →Compass and IMU calibration
Two sensors, two different symptoms, and calibrating the wrong one fixes nothing.
Open →Flying in cold weather
The aircraft is rarely the problem in the cold. The battery almost always is.
Open →Flying near water
The water is rarely the danger. Losing sensor assistance and underestimating wind are.
Open →Drone pilot field kit
What actually lives in the bag, organised so nothing gets left in the car.
Open →Drone maintenance schedule
Three intervals, three levels of attention, none of them longer than the flight itself.
Open →Camera, colour and batteries
This group is where footage stops looking like drone footage. The single largest change available to most pilots is shutter speed, because a drone camera has a fixed aperture and in daylight there is no way to reach a natural motion blur without physically cutting the light with a filter. A Freewell All Day 6-pack ND filters (Mini 3 series) ($40) covers everything from overcast to open desert on a Mini-class aircraft, and the effect on the footage is immediate and obvious.
The battery guides sit here rather than under gear because they are about behaviour rather than purchase. The gap between a rated flight time and a real one is not a manufacturer lying, it is a hover test in still air being compared against a flight with wind, movement and a landing reserve. Understanding that gap is what stops people landing on emergency warnings.
Drone camera settings for video
The five settings that decide whether footage looks professional or looks like a drone shot it.
Open →Cinematic drone moves
Five moves built on the same discipline: slow, deliberate, one input at a time.
Open →Log versus normal colour profile
More dynamic range only helps if something happens to the footage after the flight.
Open →Fixing jello and vibration
Wavy footage has a mechanical cause, and the fix is almost never in the camera settings.
Open →How long do drone batteries last?
The number on the box and the number in the field are two different measurements.
Open →LiPo battery care and storage
LiPo chemistry rewards a boring routine and punishes shortcuts, sometimes with a fire.
Open →Commercial work
Everything in this group assumes a certificated operation. Any flight in furtherance of a business needs a Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate, and that includes unpaid work for a friend's business, footage promoting your own business, and content you monetize. The certificate is the prerequisite, not the finishing touch.
Beyond the certificate, commercial work is mostly about repeatability. A mapping mission that produces a defensible model is one flown to a plan with known overlap, known altitude and surveyed Ground control point targets (10 pack) ($70) on the ground, not one flown by eye. The mapping mission planner and the ground sample distance calculator do the arithmetic that makes the plan.
Starting a drone business
The paperwork comes before the first paid flight, not after it.
Open →How to plan a mapping mission
A clean map starts with mission planning, not with the processing software.
Open →Photogrammetry workflow
Overlapping photographs in, a measured model out, and every step between is where quality is won.
Open →Roof inspection workflow
Two passes, wide and close, and a deliverable organised so a client never asks which image shows what.
Open →FPV building
Building a quad is a soldering project first and a flying project second, and the failures are mostly electrical rather than aerodynamic. These three guides run in order: the build walkthrough sets the assembly sequence so mistakes surface while they are still cheap, the soldering guide covers the joints that fail silently, and the Betaflight guide covers the configuration that turns a working airframe into a flyable one.
Two items make the difference between a learning experience and a destroyed stack. A VIFLY ShortSaver V2 smoke stopper ($13) sits between pack and quad on first power-up and opens the circuit if there is a short. A YIHUA 926 III soldering station kit (60W) ($40) with real temperature control is what lets you wet a battery pad without lifting a flight controller pad off the board.
FPV first build walkthrough
The build order that catches mistakes while they are still cheap to fix.
Open →Soldering basics for FPV
Most FPV soldering failures are dull, grainy joints that work until suddenly they do not.
Open →Betaflight setup basics
Every setting matters. One of them matters more than all the others combined.
Open →How these guides are researched
We do not fly review units and we never claim to. Procedures come from manufacturer documentation and published FAA material. Real-world behaviour, which is where documentation is least useful, comes from verified owner reviews and community reports read in volume across several sources rather than from a single forum thread. Where sources disagree the page says so and explains which way to plan.
That approach has an obvious limitation and it is worth stating. It is good at consensus and bad at novelty: a guide here will describe how a well-understood procedure works, and it will not tell you how a firmware release from last week behaves. For anything that new, the manufacturer's own release notes are the source, and for anything legal, the FAA is.
Where to go next
If you are choosing gear rather than learning a procedure, the gear picks compare categories and the complete builds assemble them into kits with stated totals. If you want a number rather than an explanation, the calculators take a specification and your conditions and give you the figure. And if a specific either-or decision is what is blocking you, the comparisons exist to settle exactly those.
Holiday gift guides
Three pages for anyone buying for a pilot rather than flying themselves. The flagship sorts twenty-five gifts by budget with the aircraft first, the under $50 list covers the accessories that get used on every flight and says which ones need the exact model, and the gift finder matches one big present to how the recipient flies, using the same calculators the rest of the site is built on.
Gifts for drone pilots
Twenty-five ideas, from an aircraft down to a $6 cell checker, sorted by budget with the big gift first.
Open → Budget guideDrone gifts under $50
Eighteen accessories a pilot actually uses every flight, every one verified under the line.
Open → Gift finderThe one big drone gift
Eight aircraft and kits that define the hobby, matched to how the recipient flies, with the calculators that settle it.
Open →Questions people ask
+ Which guide should a brand new pilot read first?
The TRUST guide, then the preflight checklist, then the LAANC guide, in that order. TRUST is a legal requirement for recreational flying in the United States and takes under an hour. The preflight checklist prevents most first-year losses. LAANC decides whether you are allowed to launch where you were planning to, and finding that out at the field is the wrong time.
+ Are these guides specific to DJI aircraft?
The procedural ones are deliberately not. Compass calibration, preflight discipline, cold weather behaviour, vibration diagnosis and mission planning apply to any multirotor. Where a guide describes a specific menu or app flow it says which aircraft it is describing, because those change between generations and even between firmware versions on the same airframe.
+ How often do these pages need re-checking against the rules?
Every time you fly, for anything airspace related. Temporary flight restrictions appear and disappear daily, and rule changes are announced with real notice but do not reach every website. Use this site to understand the shape of a requirement and use the FAA and your airspace app to confirm the current state of it before each flight.
+ What is the difference between a guide and a reference chart here?
A guide teaches a procedure and explains why it works. A reference chart is a lookup table you check in the field without reading anything. Both exist for several topics on purpose: the ND filter guide explains why shutter speed matters, and the ND filter chart tells you which density to fit in bright sun without re-deriving it.
+ Do any of these guides cover flying outside the United States?
The technique guides transfer completely. The rules guides do not. Weight thresholds, registration, remote identification and certification differ across the EU, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Japan, and each runs its own regime. Where a number is quoted it is the United States figure unless stated, and the country comparison chart lists the thresholds side by side.
