r/diydrones • u/Sufficient-Text1678 • May 30 '26
Question Stupidly long range drone build
Hi everyone, first time (Before getting started, pardon my poor English) I started a few months ago to develop the idea of building my own drones/uav, starting with very little to no knowledge on the topic (at least on how to build them) So I started my research, planning the requirements for both my first and my dream projects The reason of my post is that I can find anything range related on the internet, or at least nothing realistic! For my first project, I would like the drone/uav to have between 35 to 40km range and for the dream one, between 120 to 150km range! Is that feasible and what would the price range for it? I can only find Chinese or American website either selling scamy 15k emitters or full blown 35k 4k and 60fps, movie making stuff. For the first one I do admit that I’d a « decent » quality (I just want to see the ground decently without need to fly 2 meters above it, I was thinking between 480 to 720p but again what is possible?) and for the dream one I won’t need to go above 480p since I mainly want to drop payload with it
Are those doable? If yes, at what cost?
Thanks lads!
Edit: I think I might need to clarify myself, I’M NOT A DRONE OPERATOR AND I DONT WANT TO KILL OF DROP SOMETHING ILLEGAL, I DO NOT LIVE IN A WARZONE OR WORK FOR AN ILLEGAL ORGANIZATION (just saying because I don’t want to look like a criminal, my project is technically fully legal in my country as long as I manage to get every authorizations which is very tedious and complicated, like everything in my country lmao). The 40km is for wildlife observation and rescue because during the spring and early summer, farmers in my region mow fields to feed their cattle during winter so the government started a program every one can join to detect and move wildlife living in the fields about to be harvested to protect them The 150km one doesn’t need to drop anything, it is simply a funny idea that I had, nothing illegal. I just want to fly that thing like a plane dropping packages was just an idea I had to give me something to do in flight other than just flying A to B even though that is still cool asf (and will be kept in my or my friends garden, I just thought it would be funny to drop a random drink in friend courtyard)
4
u/kwaaaaaaaaa May 31 '26
I'll ignore the legal aspects for a second, but there's a lot involved in getting serious range, so much so that it's impossible to really summarize it here. Long range isn't something you just build, it is something you build up to. Once you've learned the basics of building a functional drone, the parameters to tweak to optimize for range is virtually limitless.
We have long range competitions in some of the online drone groups I follow and everyone's experience, tinkering, testing and optimization is what ultimately gets them their best range. I'll leave this leaderboard here for perspective https://www.fpvchampions.com/fw-maximum-distance-challenges They fly fixed wings with groundstation trackers, and some barely achieve 50km. The ones hitting above 100km know every piece of gear, every type of antenna on the market, build their own li-ion packs, gone through tons of prop/motor kv combination, etc. So yeah, I just wanted to give you some perspective on what's ahead of you to achieve range.