There are also a number of things you can do to prevent the loss of your drone, including:
- Use a tracker
- Use an app like Google Maps or Find My Drone
- Put your contact information on the drone
Preventing Loss of Your Drone
Okay, if you’re reading this before you’ve lost your drone, you might be able to save yourself some headache (and a good amount of money) if you follow my advice and use at least one of the following methods to avoid losing your drone. We’ve all heard the horror stories of the random flyaway, where the pilot claims to have been doing nothing wrong, and still the drone just took off. The first thing I’ll recommend is that you go read my article on How to Find a Lost or Crashed Drone. I cover some of the same content that I’m writing about here, but that article is focused more on what to do when you have already lost or crashed your drone. Here, I’m going to focus more on ways to prevent the loss of your drone.
Drone Trackers
The first thing you can do is to add a tracker to your drone. These basically come in three different flavors, and which one you’d want to choose depends on a few factors, including cost, subscription fees, ease of use and how trackable your drone actually becomes with the tracker attached.
Bluetooth Trackers
The first type of tracker isn’t really a tracker that is designed for drones, but is actually a tracker that is designed to just help people find things. I’m going to focus on one specific brand, which seems to have gained the lion’s share of the market here. This tracker is called the Tile Pro (Amazon affiliate link) and it’s usually only about $50-60, cheaper if you can find a single tracker, instead of a pack of multiple trackers.
Pros of a Bluetooth Tracker
The pros of this type of tracker include:
- Inexpensive
- Waterproof
- Comes in a number of sizes
- Replaceable battery (with at least a one-year battery life)
- Loud ringer
- Solid distance for Bluetooth (200-400 feet)
- Uses an app on your phone (and is compatible with Amazon Alexa, although I’m not sure how helpful that will be out in the field.)
- No monthly fee
Cons of a Bluetooth Tracker
The cons to this type of tracker are that:
- The distance on the tracker is very short in comparison to other trackers and in light of the average drone flight).
To me, the range on this tracker (or any Bluetooth tracker) just isn’t what it needs to be. Chances are, if you lost your drone, it will be way farther away then 200 to 400 feet. That said, if you lose your drone in the woods and are able to close in on it enough to engage the tracker, you could turn on the ringer and it would lead you directly to the drone. I can truly picture this being helpful because sometimes the hardest part of finding your drone is the final distance. In my other article on recovering your lost drone, I mentioned that we ended up finding my brother in law’s drone because of the flashing lights and the sound of the motor. So, having a tracker that could ring could ultimately make the difference. We’ll discuss below some of the features in the DJI GO app (including using the ESC beep on the drone) but the ESC beep just isn’t that loud and the ring on these Tiles is way louder.
Cellular Trackers
The next option for drone trackers is a cellular tracker. These tend to be a good middle ground but I still don’t love them because they require a monthly subscription fee. Additionally though, some cellular trackers have the ability to track via cellular signal, wifi, GPS and bluetooth, which is a powerful combo. The best one I’ve been able to find is one called Tracki (Amazon affiliate link).
Pros of a Cellular Tracker
The pros on a cellular tracker are the following:
- Compact size and light weight
- Ability to track using multiple types of signals (GPS, wifi, cellular, and bluetooth)
- Cost (usually around $90 but I’ve seen them on sale for as low as $25)
- Comes with a magnetic, waterproof case
- Allows for tracking of the location history of the device as well as the current location (with a route playback feature)
- Works with an app on your phone
- Battery life of at least a month
- Comes with its own SIM card
Cons of a Cellular Tracker
The only real negative here is the monthly subscription fee, which can be anywhere between $9.99 to $29.99 a month.
Some cellular trackers allow you to change the SIM card, which means you could put a SIM card in it that is connected to a by the minute cell phone plan, which means that you would only be charged when you are using the tracker. The problem that I’ve run into though is just that the trackers with removable SIM cards tend to be larger and would not work on a drone. They’re just too big. If anyone has seen one that is small enough for a drone and has a removable SIM card I’d love to see it. This seems like it would be the best of both worlds.
Dedicated Trackers
Lastly, is a dedicated tracker. These tend to be my least favorite type of tracker because the most common ones are huge. They have a large antenna and come with a separate controller with a huge antenna (or two). This always seemed like overkill to me. I mean, I understand wanting to keep track of your drone, but these dedicated devices always seemed to be better used on other devices (like cars) or animals. But these devices are still an option and should work well on a drone. The device that gets talked about the most is one called Marco Polo by Eureka Technology (Amazon affiliate link).
Pros of a Dedicated Tracker
The pros to this type of tracker are the following:
- Waterproof
- 6-week battery life with rechargeable batteries
- 2-mile tracking range
- No monthly fee
Cons of a Dedicated Tracker
The cons of a dedicated tracker are the following:
- Price (usually around $250-300)
- Need to use separate transceiver for tracking
- Large, bulky size
Use the Find my Drone Feature in DJI GO
Okay, so the DJI GO app actually has a super helpful feature called “Find My Drone.” From the main screen on the app, go the menu in the upper right-hand corner. From here, the bottom option will be to “Find My Drone.” Click this, and it will open up a map 9not unlike the one you see when flying) and it will show you either the current location of your drone, or the last known location of your drone. If you click on the red arrow icon (showing where your drone is) it will give you actual GPS coordinates. If your drone is still connected to the controller, you will also see the options to make the ESC on the drone beep and to flash the LEDs. All of this is super helpful but I actually think the GPS coordinates are the most helpful when you pair them with another app, which is also called (maybe confusingly so) Find My Drone. You can also use Google Maps by cutting and pasting the GPS coordinates into the search bar within the app.
Use an App Like Google Maps or Find My Drone
Once you have the GPS coordinates discussed above, you can then take those and input them into another app that will help show you your location in relation to your drone.
If you could easily drive to your drone, why not just put the coordinates in Google Maps? You use it to get everywhere else and it works really well. Just copy and paste the coordinates from DJI GO into Google Maps. Just FYI, when you try to copy the GPS coordinates from DJI GO, the word “copy” shows up in Chinese. Click it anyway, it will copy the coordinates. Even if your drone cannot be easily driven to, you can always set the app to plot a course to those coordinates as thought you were walking, which won’t require roads and will show you how to get there visually.
An app like Find My Drone also works, as it basically does the same thing as Google Maps, but instead of plotting a course with a map, it just shows you where you are in relation to your drone and also provides a compass view, with a number showing you how far away you are from your drone.
Put Your Contact Information on the Drone
This last tip is a simple and low-tech solution to the problem. Obviously it isn’t fail-safe and there’s a reason why this option is the last one in this article. There are plenty of problems with this solution. Weather could be an issue if your drone isn’t recovered by someone else right away. The person that finds your drone might not be honest and return it.
But, there are services out there that provide drone registration labels, which you can just buy. They’re pretty cheap and definitely serve the intended purpose. Here’s one that’s highly rated for recreational drone pilots (Amazon affiliate link). Here’s another one for commercial drone pilots (Amazon affiliate link). They both come with multiple labels as well as a lanyard and ID card. You could also put your commercial drone license in this ID card holder if you wanted to.
Another thing I thought was really cool about these labels was that they included two other stickers, one to put your phone number on and the other encouraging anyone that finds your drone (in the event of a crash or flyaway) to contact you by going to reclaimdrone.com.
What we did for my drone services company was just buy a label marker, like this one (Amazon affiliate link). Then, you could still use the label maker to encourage anyone that finds your drone to go to reclaimdrone.com. It’s a free service. All you have to do is add your drone (or drones) to their database.
