Edit

Stores

When putting together this build the most likely links to be stale, on any page I looked at, were links to parts. So while the links on this page were valid in April 2017 I expect they too will go stale fairly quickly.

In the age of Amazon and other huge online retailers it's perhaps surprising to find that the major parts for this quadcopter build have to be bought from smaller specialist retailers.

I live in Switzerland and generally look for stores in the UK, Germany and Switzerland - this page shows are the ones I found after filtering out sites that looked moribund or charged ridiculous prices.

I always like to put numbers to things so I looked up the Alexa rank for every site - though traffic figures are obviously a crude metric as to anything.

For the specialist country specific sites Unmanned Tech UK had by far the highest rank. In the UK Quadcopters UK also ranked highly. In Germany Globe Flight DE and MHM-Modelbau DE ranked highest. In Switzerland no particular specialist store stood out based on its Alexa ranking but more general major online retailers like Brack CH and Digitec CH carry a lot of drone parts. The international stores HobbyKing INT and RobotShop INT ranked higher than any of the country specific specialist store.

TODO: include links to https://www.getfpv.com/ and https://www.banggood.com/

When researching any component of this quadcopter build the name HobbyKing invariably came up - it is certainly one of the most referenced / well known sites when it comes to this area. They have European, Global (Hong Kong based) and US warehouses. The shipping estimator on their shopping cart page oddly does not optimize for cost, in my case (I live in Swizerland) it's Update Total button will always "helpfully" flip the warehouse to Europe, for all items that are available from the European warehouse, even though this can be substantially more expensive than shipping from the Global warehouse. Each item in your cart has a dropdown beside it, if it's available from more than one warehouse, so once you've registered (so the site knows your shipping location), ignore the estimator and play with the warehouse locations yourself to get the best shipping prices (shown below the estimator).

For the full Alexa figures see alexa-rank.txt - some of the stores listed here have very low/poor ranks, interpret that as you will.

E305 propulsion system

Note: DJI also sell this product directly, oddly though they don't sell the basic frame or many other parts directly.

Pixhawk

Note: each of the above shops is selling a Pixhawk from a different manufacturer, so direct price comparisons aren't necessarily meaningful, the build from one manufacturer may be of higher quality than from another.

F450 ARF kit

In the UK and Germany the F450 ARF kit is fairly consistently priced at around GBP 135 and €170 respectively. In Switzerland I found it priced at anything from Fr. 170 to Fr. 230 (at Conrad - a large retailer).

For each of the shops I've listed the version of the propulsion system that's mentioned in the text or seen in the photos. I presume that most shops are actually selling the latest version of the kit (with the E305 propulsion system) but simply haven't updated their product page since they first started carrying the kit.

Last updated on 1/16/2019
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