Welcome back to Just Cool Tech, our column where we look at tech that’s just plain fun. Today, we’re looking at the Ruko F11 GIM2 Drone, a budget friend ‘copter that offers extra long flight distances, long battery life, gimbal stabilized 4K video, and more for only $359. As a newbie pilot, I had a blast taking this drone for a test run and was able to see my area in a whole new way. If you’ve ever considered buying a drone, but found the DJIs of the world too expensive, this is definitely worth taking a closer look at.
Specifications
- Current Price: $459 + $100 off coupon = $359 (Amazon)
- Camera: 4K camera with 2-axis gimbal (Adjusted angle -80°+0°)
- Photo: 4K (3840 x 2160) stored in TF card and phone
- Video: 4K@30fps stored in TF card, 720P@30fps stored in phone
- Max Video Transmission Range: 9800 ft
- Max Flight Distance: 9800 ft
- Max Flight Altitude: 393ft
- Max Flight time: 28 Mins
- Charging Time: about 4.5hours
- Max Supported TF Card: 128GB (not included)
- Operating Temperature: 32° to 104°F ?0° to 40°C?
- Obstacle Avoidance Feature: Not equipped
- Dimension (Folded): 6.9*4.1*3.15 inches
- Dimension (Unfolded): 17.71*15.94*3.15 inches
- Phone Holder Width: 2.36 to 3.53 inches
- Weight: 1.29 lbs
Welcome Back to Just Cool Tech
Welcome back to Just Cool Tech! It’s been a minute, so I wanted to check in on what exactly this column is and what its place is on the site.
As you might imagine, we receive a lot of requests to review products on the site. Often, they’re not related at all to what we do. Hair dryers. Pet brushes. UV lights for curing nail polish. The latest and greatest tech in vaping. Most of it we just disregard. But every now and again, we get an email for something that’s genuinely neat, even if it’s unrelated to gaming. That’s where this column comes in.
See, even though I and the writers who work on my team get the opportunity to test a lot of different gear, we’re just human too. When the opportunity comes to try something fun that may also be of interest to you, we get excited at the opportunity. Rather than pass that by and stick to pure keyboards, mice, and PC gear, we decided to carve out a home for those exceptions right here.
These aren’t reviews. I believe you need a wealth of experience to write a proper review. This column is about experiencing something for the first time or sharing something with you that we’re learning about too and think is exciting enough to talk about. For this entry, I’m certainly no pro pilot, but I sure had a lot of fun putting the Ruko F11 GIM2 through its paces.
That’s the basis of Just Cool Tech. Not game related, just fun. If you’re looking for pure MMO content, pure PC tech, no hard feelings. But if you’re looking for something neat that you might like to learn a little more about yourself, this may be just the place for you.
Ruko F11 GIM2 - What Makes It Interesting?
The Ruko F11 GIM2 is part of a new wave of budget-friendly but feature rich drones. If you’ve ever considered buying a drone for yourself, you already know that those terms don’t usually go together. But there are a growing number of options that are bringing drone flight to the masses without the usual drawbacks: poor battery life, poor camera quality, limited safety features, and poor reliability and repairability.
The Ruko falls in the middle in its pricing: $459 but with a regular $100-off coupon on Amazon. It’s close to double the price of the first drone I’ve ever flown, the Holy Stone HS720G. If you’re willing to pay a bit more for the F11 GIM2, you’re buying into better video quality, an extra battery to double flight time, and most importantly, triple the flight distance.
The killer feature of the GIM2 is absolutely its range. This small drone is rated to fly up to 9800 feet away without losing connection. That’s nearly two miles. It’s farther than you can see and, in the United States, are actually allowed to fly since it’s impossible to see it at that distance. But that opens the door to footage and views you just wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. I can take off from my house and fly all the way to the park. It sounds corny, but every flight has felt a little bit like an aerial adventure.
From afar, I’ve been interested in drones and RC planes for years. But the fear of destroying them always kept me at bay. I couldn’t afford the expensive models with auto take-off and auto-landing. Sure, I could take off, but one mistake getting them back on the ground and I’d be left with a pile of broken parts for all of that money. Or what if I flew it too far and it lost signal? What if the battery died on the way back?
It makes sense, then, that as a starter drone, the Ruko takes that right out of your hands with built-in safety features. It features built-in landing and take-off modes. If you fly it out of range or won’t have enough charge to make it all the way back and land, the drone will turn itself around and fly back to the exact spot it took off from. The F11 features a built-in GPS tracker to monitor its location so you won’t need to worry about searching for wherever it might have set itself down. It goes straight home. If something unforeseen happens and it does drop from the sky, the app also keeps a log of the last recorded GPS location so you can retrieve it.
Its connectivity also comes in handy when you’re flying it extra long distances. Like most drones of its type, it’s able to send a live video feed directly to your phone, so you can live monitor exactly what the drone sees in real time. Just as importantly, it displays the drone’s location on a little map, so you can see its proximity, direction, and the direction it’s facing at all times.
The drone comes with two batteries, each rated for 28 minutes. Charging each before a flight will allow you to fly for nearly an hour, but you will have to bring the drone back halfway through to swap batteries. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Ruko includes the second battery in the package (which I’m sure helps account for its additional cost) because it’s the kind of accessory you’re more likely to want than not. The controller is rechargeable, so you won’t need to be swapping AA batteries out every other flight.
Controlling the drone is done using a mix of the controller and the app. The app is incredibly useful for the GPS features of the drone; you have to have it. The controller, however, is where you’ll actually be flying and it also lets you adjust its speed. The controller also lets you change between GPS and Altitude Modes (I didn’t turn off the GPS for fear I’d never see the drone again), snap pictures, control the digital zoom, and adjust the angle of the gimbal, in addition to other functions.
The app is where you’ll access the drone’s different flight modes and program its GPS options. I’ll talk more about its different flight modes in the next section.
The camera setup on the GIM2 is surprisingly nice. I can’t say how it compares to the likes of DJI, but I was impressed. It shoots at 4K30 FPS if you’re using an SD card (128GB maximum) or 720p if you’d like to save footage directly to your phone. What really impressed me, though, was that the footage was noticeably smoother than the Holy Stone I reviewed previously. Panning left and right can still feel abrupt, but that’s probably a side effect of my own skill as a drone pilot as much as the drone itself. Standard flight video is very smooth. With a pass through Adobe Premiere Pro’s Warp Stabilizer, you would never guess it came from a mid-level drone like this.
Ruko F11 GIM2 - Fly Time
With that background out of the way, I’m pleased to report that the GIM2 is not a smouldering pile of drone parts. In fact, I had a darn good time learning to fly it and exploring my neighborhood and surrounding parks in a brand new way.
Ruko has done an excellent job of making the drone beginner friendly. By default, it actually starts in a Beginner Mode which limits your flight distance and altitude to 30 square meters. The drone automatically returns itself to that radius if you try to fly outside of it. After a brief bit of calibration and connecting to the drone for your live feed and settings, the auto-take-off gets you flying quickly and able to learn the controls within a safe radius.
These guardrails may not be necessary if you’re familiar with drones, and each can be disabled if you choose. But as someone still in his early days of flying, it gave me the confidence to try and learn.
The drone also offers you a number of interesting video modes to choose from. The Follow Me mode can recognize people or objects and automatically follow them. If you’re worried about the drone losing you, you can also set it to track the GPS signal from your phone. Point of Interest mode allows you to set a point and have the drone circle it at a custom radius. Waypoint mode allows you to tap to set more than a dozen points on a GPS map, creating a custom route for the drone to follow.
The drone responds surprisingly well, even at long distances. I have to be honest and say that I expected the signal to get choppy far before the 9800 ft distance rating — and it did fall a bit short but not much and could have been related to weather conditions or line of sight issues. As long as it was connected, it responded quickly. Once it started to get choppy, the drone was turning itself around, so there wasn’t any issue with responsiveness.
It also responded well in the wind. The GIM2 isn’t a big drone. I anticipated that wind would risk it losing control but that just didn’t happen. I didn’t try it in a wind storm but even with moderate gusts, it was able to compensate well and stay airborne.
The biggest missing feature is obstacle avoidance. Flying at a reasonable altitude, this wasn’t an issue, but if you plan to fly it where it could potentially hit something, you’ll need to make sure your skills are up to the task. If it hits something in flight, it’s probably going to break.
As I mentioned in earlier, the stabilization is excellent, but somewhat expectedly, the quality of the video isn’t going to stack up to more expensive drones. It’s a step up from the Holy Stone (which was already pretty good, to be fair, especially at the entry-level hobbyist drone price), but it lacks some of the detail you’ll find in more expensive rigs. I found it to be perfectly usable, however, and wouldn’t expect to use a drone like this for more than personal projects anyways.
Final Thoughts
The Ruko F11 GIM2 surprised me. It’s not the absolutely cheapest drone, but what you’re getting for the money is really very good, especially for a beginner like me. The stabilization and video quality were perfect for hobbyist content creation and the extended flight range really made using it much more fun. Double the range means double the exploration, and Ruko absolutely nailed it there. At $360 with a coupon, this is a drone I’ve already recommended to friends and family, even if it means saving a bit extra. If you’ve been considering trying one for yourself, I’d say the same to you.
The product described in this article was provided by the manufacturer for evaluation purposes.
