It's quite annoying that every stage of the lesson requires you to recalibrate your controller.
When I learned to fly racing drones, I used Velocidrone; I have no experience of FPVSim.
Even if you don't plan to eventually fly an acrobatic or racing drone, the sim experience can be a bit relaxing & focused. I used to practice on a 2nd monitor while I was in large mandatory group meetings for work.
If you do plan to build and fly drones, then a simulator is absolutely worth every penny. You pay for real drone crashes with time and money, and you probably need 100 hours of practice before you can handle the real thing (and not that well).
If I were going to get back into the hobby, I'd probably try to do long range fixed wing aircraft with FPV and flight automation. The view will be much more enjoyable and the batteries will last much longer. I think there's also less community pressure around RC planes vs. drones, especially the loud racing ones.
> If I were going to get back into the hobby, I'd probably try to do long range fixed wing aircraft with FPV and flight automation.
For me personally that’s too boring.. Long range is illegal in lots of places; in the US you technically need a spotter and the craft needs to be in direct line of sight, and pretty close because it should be visible with unaided eye - so, no binoculars.
3.5" is the sweet spot where you can build a sub 250g (or almost sub 250 - do cops really carry kitchen scales on them?) drone with decent performance that doesn't scare people when you fly around and still has the performance close to a 5" one and you can still do all of the tricks. The only drawback with 3.5" is that they're more susceptible to wind, so if it's always very windy where you fly, maybe consider a 5". Oh, and you also don't need to install a remote ID module on a sub 250g quad.
I was in to drone racing for a while then got out of it and in to high powered rocketry. Interestingly, a friend is moving and wants me to take over his passion project. A rocket powered glider using an 'M' (pretty powerful) rocket motor. He has a smaller POC working with an ardupilot autopilot launching on 'H' motors. The basic gist is the rocket takes the glider up and the autopilot handles the flying until the altitude is low and then manual takeover for landing. On an M motor, the glider is going to go far out of site so the ardupilot will have to get it back to the flight line where i can see it and land.
I need to check the rules closely because there's exceptions for rocket powered gliders but I don't think i'll be able to launch at a sanctioned event and will probably have to go out to FAR (friends of amatuer rocketry) which is a multi-day drive for me. Tripoli, the main governing body for experimental high powered rocketry, has rules about guided recovery with some exceptions for gliders. I have a feeling a rocket powered glider would have to remain in sight at all times which wouldn't be the case with an 'M' motor sending it up. Someone building a rocket that can fly to 100k feet and then land at a waypoint would attract a lot of unwanted attention from authorities and be bad for the hobby which is why those rules exist.
I think these days things have changed for the better... Free simulators,light weight fun builds that don't easily be damaged/cause damage from crashes..
I just bought my first fixed wing, but it made me realize why i like my sub 100 gram " 3" toothpick" kind of quads even more. i can fly those around the home, i get 10+ minutes of flight time (trust me, it gets annoying after 8-9 minutes and you need a break before you fly the next battery!), and even if i crash that 1S toothpick into something or someone, you barely cause a scratch..
Radiomaster Boxer is probably the goto one for FPV quadcopters. If you want to fly LoS and autonomous missions then Radiomaster TX16S (large touchscreen, community support, all the LUA tememetry widgets you could ever want). For the link, it's either ELRS for manual flying or mLRS for Mavlink telemetry over LoRa.
I would recommend one of the radios that run OpenTX or EdgeTX (fork of OpenTX firmware: https://www.open-tx.org. These radios support a wide variaty of RF modules and have good support for simulators. No need to get a too expensive one.
When I learned to fly racing drones, I used Velocidrone; I have no experience of FPVSim.
Even if you don't plan to eventually fly an acrobatic or racing drone, the sim experience can be a bit relaxing & focused. I used to practice on a 2nd monitor while I was in large mandatory group meetings for work.
If you do plan to build and fly drones, then a simulator is absolutely worth every penny. You pay for real drone crashes with time and money, and you probably need 100 hours of practice before you can handle the real thing (and not that well).
If I were going to get back into the hobby, I'd probably try to do long range fixed wing aircraft with FPV and flight automation. The view will be much more enjoyable and the batteries will last much longer. I think there's also less community pressure around RC planes vs. drones, especially the loud racing ones.