Drone specs, explained

Takeoff weight, and the 250-gram line

This is the only spec on a drone that changes what the law asks of you. The FAA requires registration of drones weighing 250 grams (0.55 pounds) or more; aircraft below that, flown under the Exception for Limited Recreational Operations, need none. It costs $5 and lasts 3 years, and one registration number covers every drone a recreational flyer owns.

Its real weight is what it drags behind it. Registration also triggers Remote ID, and it means displaying the registration number on the airframe and carrying the certificate. That is why so much of this catalog clusters at exactly 249 grams: makers are designing to a legal ceiling. Of the 41 drones here, 25 are under the line and 16 are over it. The lightest is the BetaFPV Cetus FPV Kit at 35 g; the heaviest is the Autel EVO II Pro V3 at 1191 g.

Two traps. The first is the extended battery: several sub-250-gram drones offer a larger pack that adds ten to twenty minutes and pushes the aircraft past the threshold, so the same airframe is exempt with one battery and registrable with the other. The second is prop guards and filters, which also count — the number that matters is what the aircraft weighs when it leaves the ground.

Every recreational flyer must also take TRUST, free and online, at any weight — and anything that is not purely recreational needs a Part 107 certificate instead. Rules checked against faa.gov on 2026-09-24. This is a description of the published rule, not legal advice.

Remote ID

Remote ID is a broadcast of the aircraft’s identity and position, and — for a Standard Remote ID drone — the position of the control station. The rule applies to drones that are required to be registered or that are registered, which is what ties it to the 250-gram line rather than making it a separate decision.

There are three ways to comply: fly a Standard Remote ID aircraft that broadcasts from the factory, attach a broadcast module, or fly inside an FAA-Recognized Identification Area. 20 of the drones here state built-in Remote ID; 8 come from makers who do not say either way, which on a 500-gram aircraft is itself the buying information.

One behaviour catches people out. On DJI’s Mini line the broadcast follows the weight rather than the hardware: with the smaller battery, which keeps the aircraft under 250 grams, it does not broadcast; with the larger one, which pushes it over, it does. The implementation matches the rule precisely, and it means the honest answer to “does this drone broadcast Remote ID” is sometimes “it depends which pack is in it”.

Sensor size, in square millimetres

Sensor area decides how much light the camera collects; megapixels decide how finely that light is divided. Low-light performance follows the first and not the second, which is why a 48-megapixel 1/2.3-inch camera loses to a 20-megapixel Four Thirds one at dusk every time. Makers print the optical format, never the millimetres, and the formats are not an arithmetic series — so this site converts each one using the published active-area dimensions below.

Across this catalog the range runs from 17.3 mm² on the Potensic Atom SE to 224.9 mm² on the DJI Mavic 4 Pro — a factor of 13 in light-gathering area, which no megapixel count communicates. The median is 69.1 mm². These are published format dimensions rather than measurements of individual chips, so treat the figure as a comparison aid.

Resolution, frame rate, bitrate and colour depth

“4K” on a box tells you the pixel count and nothing else. Frame rate is where budget aircraft quietly diverge: one drone in this catalog records 4K at 15 frames per second and another calls 2,688×1,512 a 4K camera. Both statements are defensible and neither is what a buyer heard.

Bitrate is how much data each second of that video gets — 150 Mbps holds detail through motion that 40 Mbps smears. Colour depth is 8-bit or 10-bit, and it decides how far footage can be graded before it bands; 15 of the drones here record 10-bit. A log profile (D-Log M, D-Log, Log) flattens contrast to preserve highlight and shadow information for grading, and 15 aircraft here offer one. If you do not grade your footage, a log profile is a way to make it look worse.

Gimbals and what an axis buys you

A mechanical gimbal physically holds the camera steady on one, two or three axes; anything it does not cover is corrected electronically by cropping and warping the image. Three axes — tilt, roll and pan — is the standard on real camera drones, and 20 aircraft here have it. Two axes plus electronic correction is common at the budget end, and is frequently marketed as “3-axis” on the same page that specifies two. 16 aircraft here have no mechanical gimbal at all, which on a selfie drone or an FPV quad is a design decision and on a $200 GPS drone is a cost one.

Obstacle sensing, in tiers

Downward vision is not obstacle sensing. Almost every drone here has a downward camera, and its job is holding position; an aircraft with nothing else will hold a perfect hover and then fly into a branch at full speed. 23 of the 41 drones in this catalog have no obstacle sensing at all.

• Forward — covers the direction most collisions happen in, and nothing else.
• Forward + backward — adds the direction an aircraft reverses into during an automated move.
• Rear + side — the follow-me drones. They watch what they are backing into while tracking you, and nothing ahead.
• Omnidirectional — binocular vision on every face. Needs light to work.
• Omnidirectional + LiDAR — adds an active sensor that does not care about ambient light, which is the difference between sensing that works at dusk and sensing that switches itself off. 3 aircraft here have it.

Sensing is also not a safety net: it brakes for a tree trunk and routinely misses a power line, a thin branch or a net.

Flight time, and what the claim is measured at

This is the least comparable number on any drone spec sheet, which is why every flight-time figure on this site is printed with the conditions the maker quoted it under. Those conditions differ enormously: a hover in a windless laboratory running the battery from full to flat, a constant cruise at 28.8 kph with obstacle sensing disabled and the camera in its least demanding mode, or a forward crawl at 2 metres per second.

Claims here run from 4 minutes on the BetaFPV Cetus FPV Kit to 51 on the DJI Mavic 4 Pro, with a median of 28. 5 aircraft here have a cited third-party measurement, and the widest gap between claim and measurement is on the Holy Stone HS600D: 40 minutes claimed against 20 measured, a difference of 20 minutes.

Then there is the addition trick, which is not a test condition at all: a listing headlines “62 minutes” or “80 minutes” because two batteries ship in the box. No single flight will ever approach it. Where a maker does this, the catalog records the per-battery figure and says so.

Batteries

Watt-hours, not milliamp-hours, is the number that compares across aircraft, because mAh is meaningless without the voltage beside it. Watt-hours also determine what an airline will let you carry: most cap loose lithium packs at 100 Wh, which every battery in this catalog clears comfortably, but they limit how many spares you may bring and require them in the cabin with the terminals taped. Capacity falls with cold, and a pack stored at full charge for months degrades faster than one stored around half.

Transmission systems and range

The rated range on a drone is a laboratory figure measured unobstructed and free of interference, and it is almost always far beyond the distance you may legally fly, since US recreational rules require visual line of sight. Range figures here run from 0.05 km to 30 km. What the number is actually good for is a proxy for link robustness at the distances you do fly: a system rated to 20 km holds a clean 1080p feed at 500 metres where a Wi-Fi link is already breaking up.

DJI’s OcuSync generations (O2, O3, O3+, O4, O4+) and Autel’s SkyLink are purpose-built digital links. Potensic’s PixSync is its own. Everything described simply as Wi-Fi is a consumer radio doing a job it was not designed for, and the selfie drones flying on phone Wi-Fi are measured in tens of metres.

Speed

Top speed is quoted in the least restricted mode, with every assistance feature off, and it matters less than buyers expect on a camera drone — footage at 40 mph is mostly a demonstration that the gimbal works. Where it genuinely counts is headwind: an aircraft with a higher top speed has more margin to come home against a breeze. The fastest here is the iFlight Defender 25 RTF at 62 mph.

Wind ratings

Usually given as a Beaufort level — Level 5 works out to about 10.7 metres per second, or 24 mph. The rating describes the wind an aircraft can hold position in, not the wind it can make progress into, and those are very different claims. Mass matters more than the number: a 724-gram aircraft and a 135-gram one can share a rating and behave nothing alike. Fly out into the wind and return with it.

Service ceiling

The maximum altitude above sea level at which the aircraft can still fly, which is a density-altitude limit rather than a permission. It is irrelevant at sea level and decisive in the mountains: a 3,000-metre ceiling means an aircraft that struggles to climb from a 2,500-metre trailhead. It has nothing to do with the 400-foot limit above the ground that the FAA rules impose.

Internal storage

A small convenience that becomes a large one exactly once, on the day you arrive somewhere without a card. Capacities in this catalog run from a 2 GB overflow buffer to 64 GB. Some aircraft — the palm-launch cameras in particular — have internal storage and no card slot at all, which caps a session at what the drone can hold.

Controllers

Three kinds. A phone-clamp controller (DJI’s RC-N series and most budget equivalents) uses your phone as the screen, which drains it and heats it. A screened controller has its own display and no phone dependence, typically a $150 to $250 upgrade. And a few aircraft ship with no controller at all, flying from a phone over Wi-Fi at a range measured in tens of metres.

Return to home

GPS-based automatic return on a lost link or a low battery, and the single feature most likely to save an aircraft. Two things about it are worth knowing before you rely on it. It needs a home point recorded after the GPS fix settles, not at power-on. And on several aircraft it does not climb to the configured return altitude when it triggers within about fifty metres of the pilot, which is how a drone flying perfectly ends up in a tree at the edge of your own garden.

Geofencing

Manufacturer-imposed no-fly zones around airports and sensitive sites, enforced in firmware. Some pilots regard it as a safety net and some as a maker deciding where they may fly; Autel has never implemented it, which is a stated reason some buyers choose one. Either way the legal obligation to know the airspace is yours, and a drone that lets you take off is not telling you that you may.

Price, and the price that matters

The headline price is the base kit, and on most of these aircraft it is one battery — fifteen to thirty minutes of flying before you are driving home. The number that describes a real purchase is the multi-battery bundle, and that is the denominator this site uses for flight minutes per dollar wherever a bundle price has been verified. Where it has not, the base kit is used and the page says so.

Base prices here run from ~$160 on the BetaFPV Cetus FPV Kit to ~$2,499 on the DJI Mavic 4 Pro, with a median of ~$439. All of them are approximate snapshots from our last catalog update, not live prices, and this site links to no retailer.

Crash-cover plans

A first-year plan buys a small number of replacements at a fixed excess for damage the warranty excludes: pilot error, collisions, water. The clause to read is flyaway coverage, because that is the failure that loses the whole aircraft rather than a gimbal. The other catch is regional: these plans are tied to the country of purchase, so an imported drone frequently has no plan available at all. Where a price has been verified it is shown on the drone’s page and added into the true first-year cost; where it has not, nothing is invented to fill the gap.

Where DJI’s US availability stands

This is not normally a spec, and in 2026 it is the most consequential one on several of these pages. US Customs has been detaining DJI shipments under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act since October 2024. On 23 December 2025 the FCC added DJI to its Covered List, which blocks the equipment authorisation a radio device needs before it can legally be imported and sold — after the deadline in the 2025 NDAA for a federal security audit passed with no agency publicly completing one.

Nothing about that grounds an aircraft. Drones already here were not disabled and are exactly as legal to fly as before. What it changes is supply, and each entry in this catalog carries a dated note saying which of three positions it is in: sold new through the maker’s US channel, sold only from remaining inventory, or not offered in the US at all and therefore imported, with no US warranty.

The count across this catalog today: 16 limited, 24 sold, 1 grey market. The full timeline, and what the alternatives actually are.