Two of a four part review on the x dynamics evolved two, this episodes all about the ground station Music. First thing: youll notice, just like an expensive camera, you get a neck, strap to carry your ground station around and its securely bolted into the ground station. Taking a look at the back of the controller. This is the right hand side. The first button is for snapping a photo. The next button. The b2 button is customizable to anything youd like next, you have a dial, so you can tilt the gimbal, the camera to the left or the right as you desire. The reason you would do this is if youre lining up for a shot on an angle and the image looks a little skewed. You can adjust it so it looks correct. Finally, this is the location where you will attach your external antenna high gain antenna. If you have them, if you dont, then youll just do like me and use the internal antennas now looking at the left rear of the controller, you can see your second external antenna attachment. Then you have your position, switch for altitude mode position, mode and sport mode. You also have your customizable b1 button, customize it to whatever you want. Next, you have your video record button and finally, you have your gimbal functions, so the gimbal can actually look up above horizon. The camera looks up above horizon and you can look all the way down 90 degrees and you can go past 90 degrees.
As you can see here, im going beyond 90 and if you wish you can flip it straight back up with a touch of a button on the rear of the ground station. You have three ports, one is for a microsd card. You can increase the storage of the ground station if you wish. The next one over is a usbc and the third one is an hdmi port. The ground station battery is rechargeable and removable and when you slide it off, here is what the specifications on the rear look like. Finally, you have four additional customizable buttons to anything. You want, plus a tripod mount to charge the ground station. The charge port is located right here. Unfolding the ground station reveals two displays. The top display is an 8 inch touchscreen with a 1000 nit brightness at the top of the display is a microphone which is not activated. We also have a camera which is not activated, but we do have a light sensor which is activated looking at the right hand, side of the ground controller. We have the speaker, the right hand, joystick and the return to home button. Next, we have an indicator light and below that we have our 5.5 inch touchscreen with a brightness of 1000 nits. On the left hand, side we have the power button followed by the left, joystick and finally, the auto takeoff and auto lan button. All right lets get everything working so lets power on the evolv, 2.
Double click on the power button next go over to the ground station and just press the power button, and it will start up im going to speed everything up here. It takes about 10 seconds for everything to get going, and here we have it. If you have an internet connection, youll get weather data to enter the interface on the ground station. Just touch the start here button now, if you had attached external antennas high gain antennas, this is where you would select them external, but if you have the internal ones, just leave it on internal on this screen, you can also confirm that your sensors are behaving correctly. You enter the settings menu by pressing the gear icon at the top right, its very important before your first flight that you set your return to home height to be higher than everything else around you as well. If youre going to fly around a lot of objects, you might want to turn this option on. This is where youre going to customize all those buttons on the ground station. Here you can see the video transmission coming from the drone back to the ground station, its shooting back at 1080p. If you want to get a longer flight time closer to 30 minutes, then i would highly suggest you change everything to 15 for the low battery warning. Now, when i fly, i use my cell phone as a hotspot to give the ground controller a wi fi signal to get the maps.
However, if you dont have such a thing, you can download the maps ahead of time, as you see me doing right here, if theres a firmware update for any component of the drone or ground station youll be notified and it will show up at one of the Spots here and when you run the firmware, you can just basically run it and walk away. Ive done three firmware updates since ive had this drone and all of them have been very, very smooth. Now the ground station does have internal storage quite a bit of it too, as you can see to cache all your videos and your photos that you take in all your telemetry when youre ready to fly just touch the ready to fly button and youll be taken To a map of where youre standing, you can scroll up from the bottom to see other weather information. As long as you have a wi fi connection, i didnt use one here. You can also see the rpms of your motors when theyre spinning your battery and quite a few other bits of information. The map you can change it to a satellite view if you wish, as you fly around your icon of your drone, is always shown on the map. So youll always see where you are. You can zoom in or scroll around the map, as you desire. Looking at the bottom of the home screen, you can find your album. These are all the videos and photos that the ground station has cached for you.
So every time you went for a flight, it saves your flight videos or photos on the ground station and you can review them at any time. All flight information is captured under the pilot icon, so go to flight records and you can see all the flights youve taken so far. Theres my total flight time and down there thats my top altitude for each flight and thats my top distance for each flight. Now the distances look large thats total distance. Now i just want to show you a quick little example of how this can be pretty cool, so im going to pick one of my flights where i actually crashed my drone. Yes, i crashed this drone, so there was a flight i did at a local park and you can see its drawing the outline of where it was going. Look at the bottom left thats. The rpm of the motors right here is where im going to encounter a problem, so im going to zoom in so im, just playing back what happened and right there, where im pointing thats a cell tower for cell phones. It was much higher than the drone. So im flying along and i saw the cell tower and im gon na – go behind it, but because of where i was standing, i lost transmission yep, so the drone is going to go into return to home, but when it went into return to home it crashed In to the cell tower, because i had to go straight home so youre going to see it crash here, but watch the rpms in the bottom left watch the motors because i damaged one prop on one motor watch this its about there we go 12 percent.
It went down to and spun out of control and then it regained itself – and it came back to me – ill show you i have video from it. I can show you right here on the ground station, so here i am flying. Drone is going to move to the right and right on the right is a cell tower and im starting to lose whoa and then all of a sudden, when my video reception comes back theres, the cell tower bang and yeah, so the drone it flew back. I thought it was a goner then, but nope it flew back to me and it came back and i thought it was gon na you know be kind of wonky, but look at how smooth it is. This is the actual video of it coming back to me. So it lands and then im gon na go check what the damages i do have a scuff on the actual motor side and one of the props. As you can see right, there is kind of destroyed. I thought i might have damaged the led lights underneath as well, because it flipped around quite a bit, but they look to be. Okay, now lets take a look at our main display. This is where theres a lot of information so going from left to right. The first item is speed. Second item is your altitude? Third item. Is your distance from home? Fourth item? Is the aircraft status altitude mode position mode sport mode position? Mode? Fifth item is wi fi.
Signal. Sixth item is gps signal and number of gps satellites number. Seven. Would be your ground station signal? Number eight would be your image transmission signal. Number nine? Is your aircraft battery status number ten? Is your ground station battery status number eleven is the current time. Your remaining flight time is shown on this green line. The green line will get shorter until it gets to where that pink arrow is and thats your return to home. Now for me and my filming i like to use manual, settings and manual focus, as you can see here, you can adjust it manually, but for most people you might want to use autofocus so im going to switch to autofocus right here and just show you where It is, and when you do autofocus, then you can just tap on what you wish to focus on so, depending on your aperture and the lens, you can get depth of field or autofocus ill. Show you that later, as were coming up in the video here now, when using manual settings, you can do some crazy things like check this out. I just cranked the iso to 25 000.. Most drones dont have 25 000. They stop at like 3 000. So, like i said this is like a real camera. You can do all the settings manually that you would on a real camera now quickly show you, the video camera settings so were in video mode and going down youll see im, always filming in manual mode.
You do have auto time value aperture value. Also, video mode is normal. Theres, my video size, its quite large. You can record up to 200 megabits per second. I leave it at 100, h264 h265 and the three types of pro res. Each type of prores gets larger and larger in size. I like to leave my metering at center because thats what im pointing at white balance is actually really good on this drone uh autofocus. I put it on manual here its on auto, because i was just showing you that video style is pretty important if you dont know what youre doing this is where you want to set things up. You can see my sharpness at the bottom. I havent had five, but anyways punchy is what i use on cloudy overcast days. I dont really use low contrast thats. If i want to do some post processing and solas, you know black and white film noir. It does look really good, probably the best black and white ive seen, but if you have no plans to do post processing then just use punchy punchy is pretty good because it brings it very similar to like a dji camera drone. In other words, the contrast is way overdone here, im showing you some basic camera settings to help you out, i always leave the histogram on the grid display is on. I use focus peaking because i use manual focus noise reduction if youre shooting in pro res.
You must turn that on it helps out quite a bit color profile. I always leave it at standard. My come on finger go down my record media right there. I always leave it at c fast because thats what i record to i never use the micro sd card, the file name when im working on projects, i like to modify the file name here on the card, so it matches the project. Here i can format either the sd or the cfast, moving down to the bottom right that little icon there is the last video or photo you took in case. You want to review it really quick going along the bottom. These are all your camera settings. Make sure you know how to use a camera, because if you dont, you are not going to get good results with this drone after spending a ton of cash youre gon na be quite upset. Here i put the app tread wide open at f, 1.8, adjusted all the other settings, and now i have depth of field. So if i want to focus on a blade of grass, i can focus on a blade of grass and make some awesome videos when im flying around. You know focus on things near or far, and it looks quite professional here. We have all your resolution settings on the left and all your frames per second settings on the right. You can see this quite a bit for each resolution.
Looking at the bottom left. This is the angle of your camera. As you go down, you can see. It goes negative and as you go up, it goes back to zero or positive. If you go above the horizon now, i am quite happy with this drone, but i do have one negative with the video transmission watch. This look at the lag time i find its its quite a bit. You dont notice it when youre flying, but if youre gon na head for a tree or something yeah that lag could uh cause a problem. Now, if you havent watched part one of my video series on the review of the evolv 2, please watch it because ill show you all the features of the drone, all the specification. What makes it so great and then this is part 2 youre watching now, which had the ground station in part 3. We are going to check out how good is that camera? You know how does it work at night in bright, sunlight in you know, dull days and part, four will be me. Taking the evolve two out for a flight and you coming along with me. You know from start to finish flying one full battery. I just want to show you exactly some of the cool things you can do with the drone just out and about out in the field by then many of the firmware updates should be out, so it should be great, so stay tuned for that.
