Jumping on the 4 inch long range bandwagon! This style of qwad is all the rage four months ago so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. The new European and UK regulations aside I figured keep it below 250g and less people will shout at you. The priority here though was flight time, range, and signal range, in that order. I have other quads for freestyle this was not designed for that in anyway, though it’s still more sprightly than any DJI around.

What was a bit of a kick in the shins was that the RTF Diatone Roma starts at £120 which is un-match-able by us lowly homebuilders. The temptation was actually to buy one then tear it apart and fix some of its flight issues (see online). This actually works out the same cost as building from scratch, now that is what I call capitalism. The two issues I wanted to fix by building from scratch was the ‘rough’ motors causing vibrations in flight, and the bad GPS.

The frame is excellent, nuff said.

The motors are the Geprc version for cost efficiency. Paired with the always reliable Mamba Mini F405 Mk3 stack with 6 UARTS why even bother with F7? The VTX is the weak point the well had run dry of good VTXs this will be the first to go. All the 4K goodness of the hybrid camera comes at the expense of 20g and very limited space upfront. The stack is a bit squished but carbon fiber is not conductive right? Self-powered buzzer fitted as standard. The GPS is the TBS running ublox M8 GNSS and has the quad tripping over satellites, maximum 1 minute start up from first plugin. It did need some gentle persuasion to get it in the TPU mount from Diatone. Video antenna is collapsible for ease of transportation.

Headline – On a 650mAh HV 4S it can average 10-11 minutes flight time, in cold weather.
On a 2000mAh 4S Li-on it can average only about 15-16 minutes. I think this is due to some cheap poor quality cells and the large increase in weight.