I met these cool guys from “Blind Spots Content LLC / Newco” few days ago. They were flying a nice lithium ion (not lipo!) powered quadcopter, for bird abatement. The quad had a loudspeaker and made noises to scare birds out of cherry trees. I’ve been doing the same for a couple years with a Bird B Gone’s guts strapped to the bottom of my quad. In my experience, it works to pressure birds out of the orchard (and move them into your neighbors lol).

The “Horizon” quad had a 4S 10Ah blue brick of lightweight lithium ion goodness. I wasn’t timing the flights but it was well over 30 minutes. He said that he can go for over 75 minutes with a larger pack. Derek has a flight on youtube of 29 miles, pretty good!

Specs:
4S 10,000mAh li-ion mystery battery, but looked like GEB cells
18″ Carbon fiber props
low amperage motors
Custom carbon fiber frame
Dji Naza-M v2 flight controller,  Pixhawk is available too
Fatshark FPV camera
Flysight FPV 5.8GHz with helical add on antenna
Spektrum DX8 2.4GHz radio

Optional payloads:
4K FMV (GoPro or similar) on 3 axis gimbal
FLIR VUE PRO 640 thermal vision
GEMS Precision Ag sensor by Sentek Systems (“Ag. Mapper”)
Bird Control sound payload (“Bird Eliminator”)
LIDAR coming soon

Its a nice quad, that flies great. But at $6,000+ its for a very special someone. Not to mention most of the guys interested in this sort of product are not pilots or RC enthusiasts but farmers, so this could be their first drone. So, if this is your first quad, get some training then step up to this.

You can find more about them at: http://blindspotscontent.com/