I am very happy with the Squirt’s transformation. After switching to a DJI FPV Setup, I gained a bit more weight and my total flight time really suffered. I tried a few things to lose the extra weight but the only thing that helped the most was a larger battery. My current battery of choice is a Tattu 1300mah 4s HV. Most of the time I do not charge it HV because I feel when I charge a lipo to HV it does not last as long. For the most part I was happy because I am getting 5 minutes of flight time again.

Then I starting to learn more about Bidirectional DSHOT and how people are getting more flight time. Setting up Bidirectional DSHOT was easy because I already had a BLHeli_32 ESC, and all I had to do is make sure I had the most current firmware on my ESC. If you are interested in all my settings, I posted a screen shot of everything in the image gallery below. Around the same time, I came across a posting on facebook and how Robert Moss has some good PIDs for Betaflight 4.1.5. I sent him a PM and he sent me the screen shots of his setup. After I got everything setup, I gained about 1 minute of flight time with Bidirectional DSHOT and it also flies better with the new Betaflight settings. Now, I am about 6:30 minutes (7:30min in HV).

Next up, mini prop ducts and props. I do not expect any flight time increase with shorter ducts, but I was hoping for better flight characteristics. With “real” prop ducts, it will give you a lot of downward thrust. So, it gets challenging to fly when you fly very close to ground because of the prop wash. It is less of a problem if you are flying fast but when you are flying slow you have all this air pushing the quad all over the place. To my surprise, the shorter ducts did not have any noticeable negative effects. The flight times was about the same as the regular size ducts. I think I gained some more flight time with the weight loss. The biggest improvement is how it handles, especially with freestyle flying. The point of the Squirt is usually slow cinematic flights but now you can throw in some freestyle moves every now and then. Most importantly I also seen an improvement when flying closes proximity of walls, ground and hallways. It is almost a no brainer to switch to these mini ducts. A side note about the mini ducts. It is no longer free to download because he as moved it to Cult3D where it can be purchased. It is very easy to remix the orginal ducts that Andy Shen created, but you need some help just sent me a message.

Finally, the new props. I have collected 3 different props over the past 6 months and never tried them out because they are a little too big. I would need to trim the props before I can use them. For some odd reason, I hate trimming the props. So, I avoid testing them until now.

The newest props I purchased are the Gemfan D76 Ducted Durable 5-Blade 76mm. I did not notice a significant noise reduction, but I did get hotter motors and less flight time. Maybe this might be a better fit with a larger motor setup. With BH 1407 3600kv motors, it did not do too well.

Next up are the iFlight MegaBee V2 3045 Props. I only learned about these on Facebook and people were raving how good it is. I have to say, these props have the best flight time between all the props I have ever used. I was able get an 8:07 minutes of flight time with a NON HV charge. My only gripe about these props are the colors. The red did not match the theme I was going with the squirt.

The iFlight Nazgul Cine 3040 is my prop of choice but with the next best flight time of 7:50 minutes. The time difference is only 10 seconds so the way I flew, or the wind condition could have changed the result. There are 2 reasons why I went with the iFlight Nazgul Cine 3040 props and that is because of the color of the props and how smooth it felt. No matter how I flew the Squirt, 9 minutes of slow cinematic flying or 4 minutes of fast freestyling, the motors always stayed nice and cool with both iFlight props.

I have 4 videos to show you my two flight. Each flight includes the DJI DVR and GoPro 7 video:

This is the 9 minute flight footage recorded with the DJI DVR Goggles:
Warning!! This is long and boring video, the point of this is maximum flight time.

GoPro7 recording of the same 9 minute video:

Here is the freestyle flight footage recorded with the DJI DVR Goggles:

This is the same freestyle footage as above but recorded with GoPro 7:

UPDATE: Oct 19, 2020 - Samsung 30Q 18650 3000mAh

Thanks to a friend who supplied me with a boat load of 18650 Samsung 30Q 18650 3000mAh batteries, I was able to build some 4s and 6s flight packs. These are used 18650 batteries taken from a One Wheel and even with used batteries I am getting around 12 minutes of flight time.

DJI DVR recording of a 12 minute video:

GoPro7 recording of the same 12 minute video: