I have been piloting drones for a while now as a part of my RC hobby interests that do not go just for remote controlled cars, but other RC models such as multicopters (drone may be used as a much broader term) as well as others. On a RC car race you can often find people that bring their other remote controlled models such as drones to fly a bit and maybe even take some photos and videos from the sky of the race itself. I was lucky that a friend brought his Walkera Voyager 3 drone as I was interested in checking it and trying it out to get some firsthand impressions from it. The Voyager 3 is a higher-end quadcopter similar to the DJI Inspire, though it is more affordable and may be not as good in some areas by default. After playing a bit with the drone I figured out that I may share some thoughts about it for anyone interested in what the Voyager 3 is and can do, as apparently Walkera will soon be releasing the Voyager 4 that is supposed to be a significant improvement.

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Brief Information about the Voyager 3

Walkera positions the Voyager 3 drone as a professional aerial photography platform though if you ask me there is more to be desired if you are buying it with that purpose. The digital video link that DJI uses in their drones is what makes them really the best platform for the moment for aerial video recording or photography and it is hard to compete with that. The Voyager 3 is really well built and packs some interesting features as well as a drone, but it is lacking in the photo/video recording area, but more about that in a moment. Overall it is good-looking and well-designed piece of equipment that can fly pretty stable and is easy to control, has a broad range of features and works really well.

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Walkera Voyager 3 is a modular quadcopter (4 rotors) with modular design and some interesting features such as retractable legs and gimbal for the camera. The drone supports both GPS and GLONASS for more precise stabilization and GPS functionality such as automatically following you or going through predefined waypoints to shoot something and coming back to you. The whole platform is based around the open source APM flight-controller and that allows for a lot of adjustment and tweaking if the user is more advanced and wants to be able to play around with the drone more. The average regular user can still have pretty good out of the box functionality without having to tweak up anything on the drone as the standard settings are pretty good already.

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A Bit About the Transmitter

The standard transmitter (remote control) for the Voyager 3 is the Walkera DEVO F12E. A really good one with 12 channels and a lot of features, including built in LCD display and FPV video receiver (32-channel one). So it seems like a good combination to go along with the Voyager 3 not only in terms of drone control, but also in terms of camera control and preview of what the camera sees and can record. The control range and the video transmission range from the drone are really good, so you can easily fly the drone further away than you would be able to see it and then bring it back manually or automatically. If the drone loses the signal from the radio at some point it should start to automatically get back to the point where it took off from, so you should not be able to lose it easily.

Now, for the not so good things about the transmitter. The LCD display that you get is just not bright enough for proper use on a bright sunny day, you will hardly see anything on it even if you have the sun hood, though it will make things a bit better. In terms of resolution and image quality things are fine, just the brightness is not really enough at certain conditions. The video link here is analogue, so there could be some flickering on the screen and the image resolution is not very high. The advantage of the use of analogue video link is that you have almost no delay, the disadvantage is that the resolution and quality are lower, but you don't have that much alternatives. As I've already explained only DJI currently offers a really good digital video link with HD quality that works really well and is not way too expensive. The only drawback that this digital video link has however is that there is some slight delay that can go up to a few hundred milliseconds. Usually that is not a problem, unless you are flying an FPV racing drone for example where response needs to be really fast and delays in the video link could cause problems.

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The Battery and the Charger

The Voyager 3 uses a pretty powerful smart 8 cell Lithium-Polymer battery that is 29.6 Volts and has a capacity of 3000 mAh. Normally a single fully charged battery should be able to supply you with about 20-25 minutes of flight time. The solution to get more flight time and it can be needed if you are trying to shoot video of an event or take photographs from the air is to just have a couple of batteries available, charged and ready to be used. The battery is pretty specific as it comes with some extra features, so you will need to buy official batteries for the drone from Walkera that were specially made for Voyager 3. The batteries do come with a LED light indicator, so you can visually get an idea on how much charge is left in them when the drone is close to you.

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The default charger you get with the drone is a more compact and simplified one capable of supporting LiPo batteries up to 8 cells (like the one the drone uses) and able to supply up to 100W when charging. The charger is made by SkyRC, a popular company in the RC battery chargers market that makes the hugely popular IMAX range of universal chargers as well as some other RC specific products. The charger works fine, even though it is only designed for LiPo/LiFe batteries and is not a more advanced universal solution. If you get a couple of more batteries however you might be willing to get a more serious and advanced charger to help you get them charged faster and easier. For an out of the box solution the SkyRC e8 charger does a pretty good job in charging and balancing the different cells of the Walkera Voyager 3 battery.

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The Controller and Extra Tuning Options

As I have already mentioned the Voyager 3 drone relies on the open source APM flight-controller and that means that if you are a more advanced user you can play around with more settings and how the controller of the drone works. You just need to plug in a USB cable to the controller and to your computer and can fire the Mission Planner software for example to monitor, adjust and control the drone. You need to be extra careful modifying settings that you don't know well as this can affect the normal operation of the drone and can result in possible issues, so make sure you know what you are doing in the software. Again, the Voyager 3 has a pretty decent standard settings already applied and ready to be sued out of the box, so normally you don't need to play around with it tweaking something further for normal use. The option to do so is there and you can use this for getting the drone to do way more than it was originally capable of by even further extending its basic functionality...

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The Default Camera and Photo / Video Recording

While the Voyager 3 does come with a pretty decent camera and I've also tried with the iLook series of cameras that Walkera makes, the level of quality is nowhere near as good as an up to date GoPro action camera is capable of delivering. That is precisely why the drone may not be that perfect out of the box for use as a platform of photo and video recording, or at least it is one of the reasons. As a photographer or videographer you would most likely need really good quality footage and the good thing is that you can use a gimbal that can take a GoPro camera just like it can take a Walkera iLook (similar size and design product). So you can significantly improve the level of quality you can get over the stock setup, but with a GoPro camera you are not able to control its full operation remotely thus there are some compromises to be made. You can still start it up recording before you take off and have it set to also take photos at a certain interval for example and you can control the gimbal while in the air. Again DJI is much more flexible and provides really good results with their own stock cameras on drones such as the Phantom 3/4 and Inspire, so these could be a better out of the box solution for aerial photography or videography.

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Time to Fly the Quadcopter Finally

As far as the flying is concerned the Voyager 3 does really work well, it is stable and obedient to the commands you give it. The control is precise and accurate and the transmitter is really well to work with. The automatic GPS stabilized mode works really well if you have sufficient number of satellites in range and with the GPS and GLONASS support that is usually not an issue either. The circle around mode is nice extra feature if you want to take photos or even a video of the drone stable moving around an object automatically instead of having to do it manually controlling it. The Voyager 3 remains pretty stable even where is a decent wind, not drifting much and able to keep a pretty stable position with GPS mode as well. So easy to fly and use even in not the best conditions, though if you are recording video or taking photos you still need to be careful with the weather conditions to get the best results. The camera gimbal is pretty good in providing you with a nice and stable image, but is not perfect and can sometimes not be able to handle things good enough. The camera you use is also important for getting good quality photos and videos, so that is another component that should not be overlooked. After all Walkera markets this as a drone for taking photos and videos from the air and while it really does a good job there is more to be desired and DJI most certainly puts up a serious competitions in that segment.

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