Flying a drone in Pattaya......

[Al_Davis 28]

Is it possible to get the necessary paperwork in Pattaya in order to legally fly a drone in Thailand or must I go to Bangkok to sort it out?

[forcebwithu 4,853]

30 minutes ago, keyman said:

Do you need a licence or permissions to fly your drone in Thailand?

Nice pics, by the way 😀

Found an already existing topic to post a reply to your question in. And the answer is yes, you are supposed to have insurance and register your drone to legally fly in Thailand. Many don't, but I decided to get legal. This is a C&P of a post I made last Monday (28 Oct) on another forum.

Drone insurance now sorted. Took about an hour to scan, complete, sign and scan again signed copies of the following.

1. Provide a clear photo of the drone and a photograph of the drone's serial number.
2. Provide photos of remote control and serial number.
3. The drone's receipt
4. Attach a signed copy of passport. This includes the personal information page and the latest immigration stamp page.
5.Please apply for the NBTC link  https://anyregis.nbtc.go.th/sign_up/foreigner/ and send your User and Password

Insurance is through the broker (link) the DJI store recommended, Thai Pattana Insurance. Because my drone weighs more than 300g the cost was 790B.

I also took advantage of their offer to handle the registration with NBTC and CAAT for an additional 535B, which includes the 214B NBTC registration fee. So for 321B extra they do all the registration doc prep and uploading to the respective govt websites, which is not an unreasonable fee IMHO.

When I asked about damage insurance, this is the reply I received.
Drone damage insurance costs an additional 3,990 and 5,990 baht, and the insurance company takes quite a long time to process. The insurance company waits for about 15-25 days, which makes the CAAT license take 30-60 days to apply for.

I judged the risk of a fine for flying an unregistered drone to be greater than the risk I'm going to crash, so declined the damage insurance.

[forcebwithu 4,853]

I'll C&P a couple of other posts I made on another forum on the subject of drones.

Thought I'd add to this topic with my own experience as a new drone pilot.

Back in May I bought my first drone, the Potensic ATOM. At only $380 USD it's a great entry level drone with some cool subject tracking features. What it lacks though is any kind of collision avoidance system which I really could have used about a month ago when I backed the drone into a tree branch. Fortunately the drone survived the fall to earth largely unscathed.

What did get damaged though is the underside sensor that tells the drone to turn off once its landed. Not a big deal as drones have another mechanism for turning off. That is set it to hover in front of you, grab the underside of the drone and turn it upside down. When the drone senses it's gone inverted it will automatically turn itself off.

While I've been really happy flying the ATOM, DJI announced two weeks ago the release of the Air 3S. While the price tag is quite a bit higher at $1,599 USD, it's packed with features that I'd been salivating over trying to decide if it was worth the hit to my bank balance to have.

On Saturday I could resist no more and bought myself a brand new DJI Air 3S at the Central DJI store. What was nice is the blow to bank balance was somewhat softened as the price in Thailand is 49,900B, which at today's exchange rate is $1,476 USD. It seems gone are the days when electronics were much more expensive here than in the US.

After studying up on how to fly the new drone I took it out for a test flight late yesterday.

One concern I had was at 724g how much louder the 3S would be compared to my 249g Potensic ATOM. Turns out while it's about as loud as the ATOM, it's at a lower frequency. So rather than sounding like a bee, it's more like a buzz sound which is easier on the ears.

Another plus for the 3S is the RC 2 controller with the built in screen. It's larger and much brighter than my mobile which is used as the controller screen for the ATOM.

For the test flight I tried out focus tracking and active track features. I also tested the obstacle avoidance system which worked as advertised. It never let the drone get within about 2m of any obstacle. That's a godsend as I intend to use the drone for following H3 runners through jungle trail.

Here's a couple of raw, unedited videos of the Pattaya area. In the first I played around with switching from the wild angle lens to the 3X telephoto lens. The 2nd video I  had a go at using the 9x digital zoom while trying to manually track a motorbike on Sukhumvit.

A side note to that is I was surprised how many motorbikes ignore the no motorbikes in the underpass restriction. IRRC, there was a news report about a month ago they were going to put a stop to that, real soon now.

 

 

[forcebwithu 4,853]

I had the drone out for a couple of training/test flights this morning.

It was a breezy morning and I was impressed with how stable the drone was, even at 50m high. I did notice though on reviewing the video the pan shots were a bit jerky in spots, probably because of the drone moving slightly to compensate for a wind gust.

Another feature I tested out was focus track using both the POI auto follow me mode and tracking using a predescribed flight path around the object of interest. Again the onboard collision avoidance system worked great. The only negative I would give it is the baked in 2m avoidance distance is too much on the conservative side for how I would like to use the drone. That is following a runner down a jungle trail that quite often doesn't have at least 2m of width.

The other feature that is really impressive is auto land. In this vid, which the flight is completely hands off the controller after touching the return to home button, I purposely positioned the drone with trees between the drone and the landing spot, which was very close to overhanging palm fronds. The drone flew to a spot over the palm trees and then dropped down until its collision avoidance system detected the tree. It then paused and the onboard AI worked out an alternative flight path that would avoid the tree. Very, very cool.

BTW, the orange landing pad is used to protect the propellers from dust and debris on take offs and landings. It's not used by the drone to identify the return to home point, that's done via GPS coordinates.

 

This flight I judged the gap in the structure to probably be the minimum distance between objects I could fly the drone without the collision avoidance system kicking in. The test flight proved that, so now I know what I can get away with when recording H3 runs in the jungle.

 

In addition to the panorama shot I posted in the Pattaya Pics topic, here's a couple of still shots I took to check the resolution (4k x 3k) and sharpness of the pics.

Edited November 3 by forcebwithu

[forcebwithu 4,853]

I caught the drone bug back in June and purchased my first drone, the Potensic ATOM during my trip back to the States. For those interested in an entry level drone, the ATOM is a great drone that sells for around $380 USD.

A few C&P posts about my experience flying the ATOM.

June 28

Had fun flying my new Potensic Atom drone today. I've never flown a drone before, so let my son give me a quick demo flight with him at the controls on how it works. Much faster and easier learning to pilot a drone having him doing a demo flight first. After that quick demo I did a couple of practice flights and found it very easy to pilot the drone.

Video below from the first flight. My first attempt at video is a stutter start/stop pan around my son's neighborhood while in a hoover a couple hundred feet up. At the time it was pretty windy out, so pretty amazing how stable the image is.

 

I also played around with the gimbal mounted camera to tilt the camera down and grab a still photo of the beginner at the controls.

 

July 2

I had a chance to get out yesterday for a few more test flights. If you don't count crashing into the side of my brother's house and having my son's dog snatch the drone mid-air with his mouth, I had several good flights. Shame I wasn't recording those flights as it would be entertaining to watch the replays.

What's impressive is in both instances the drone came through unscathed. I thought for sure I would be getting unexpected practice replacing broken or out of balance propellers.

I tried out a couple of the different Quick Shot features. The most interesting were the visual tracking and boomerang options. Both of the videos below were shot with the drone software controlling the flight.

 

 

July 10

I used my new drone to shoot video of the Hash run yesterday. To edit the video I used DaVinci Resolve, which for the amatuer stuff I'm doing the free version is more than adequate.

Still too jerky on the controls, but hopefully I'll get the hang of it soon enough.

BTW, that's Mabprachan Reservoir in the background of some of the shots. It's looking pretty low.

 

August 14

Here's a handy site, UAV Forecast, for checking current and forecasted flight weather conditions.

 

October 24 (and what led me to decide I needed to upgrade to a drone with a collision avoidance system)

Whatever my next drone is, I want something with a collision avoidance system.

Another nice feature to have would be a follow me mode. From the few videos I've shot of hash runs, I realize now how difficult it can be to keep runners in a close up shot while avoiding obstacles.

A good example of that was a month ago I used the Potensic to video a hash run. At one point I set up on a rise of land overlooking a nearby road that was the final part of the trail. As a group was running/walking towards the drone, I slowly backed the drone up to keep them in the shot. It was looking pretty good, until it wasn't.

What I neglected to account for was a tree that had branched out over the road. The video below is cued to start at that point. Unfortunately while the last thing I saw on my phone screen was twigs and leaves as the drone plummeted to the ground, the video saved just cuts out at that point. It would have been cool if what I saw had been captured on the SD card.

But my bad luck didn't end there. As I made my way down from the rise of land back to the a-site, I managed to walk into and through a ground nest of wasps. Before I could say oh shit, the swarm rose up and nailed me six times as I ran, screaming like a little girl, "bees, bees, bees!".

One of the hashers did recover the drone before passing traffic squashed it. And amazingly it seemed none the worse from the crash. I did discover the next time I took it out for a flight the controller screen was showing an "opticflow error" message. A search online didn't come up with any definite answers as to what the error meant, but even with that error it still flew fine until I landed the drone.

When landed the drone didn't shut down and the propellers continued to spin making it dangerous to pick up the drone and manually turn it off. My guess is the opticflow error had something to do with the underside sensors were damaged from the fall and could no longer determine when the drone had landed.

Fortunately I remembered a trick my son showed me with his DJI and my drone. That is setting it to hover at head height, then grab the drone from underneath and turn it upside down. When the drone senses it has gone inverted, it turns itself off.

 

October 28

So, here I was on my morning rideabout. I was riding by Central when I suddenly felt this burning sensation in the hip area. I parked my bike and made my way into Central thinking the A/C might help, but if anything the burning sensation increased.

I remembered there was a clinic on the 3rd floor so I made my way up the escalators. As the floor numbers increased so did the burning sensation. I finally made it into the clinic, explained the problem and the kind lady understood immediately what was happening, rushed off to the backroom and came back with the medication I needed for my condition.

She then explained the money I had was burning a hole in my pocket and I needed to immediately empty my wallet in exchange for the box of medication she was holding.

And damned if she wasn't right. As soon as I had emptied my wallet the burning sensation was gone and I was the proud owner of a brand new...

Edited November 3 by forcebwithu

[forcebwithu 4,853]

On 11/2/2024 at 4:47 PM, forcebwithu said:

Found an already existing topic to post a reply to your question in. And the answer is yes, you are supposed to have insurance and register your drone to legally fly in Thailand. Many don't, but I decided to get legal. This is a C&P of a post I made last Monday (28 Oct) on another forum.

Drone insurance now sorted. Took about an hour to scan, complete, sign and scan again signed copies of the following.

1. Provide a clear photo of the drone and a photograph of the drone's serial number.
2. Provide photos of remote control and serial number.
3. The drone's receipt
4. Attach a signed copy of passport. This includes the personal information page and the latest immigration stamp page.
5.Please apply for the NBTC link  https://anyregis.nbtc.go.th/sign_up/foreigner/ and send your User and Password

Insurance is through the broker (link) the DJI store recommended, Thai Pattana Insurance. Because my drone weighs more than 300g the cost was 790B.

I also took advantage of their offer to handle the registration with NBTC and CAAT for an additional 535B, which includes the 214B NBTC registration fee. So for 321B extra they do all the registration doc prep and uploading to the respective govt websites, which is not an unreasonable fee IMHO.

When I asked about damage insurance, this is the reply I received.
Drone damage insurance costs an additional 3,990 and 5,990 baht, and the insurance company takes quite a long time to process. The insurance company waits for about 15-25 days, which makes the CAAT license take 30-60 days to apply for.

I judged the risk of a fine for flying an unregistered drone to be greater than the risk I'm going to crash, so declined the damage insurance.

I finally got the last of my drone registration docs yesterday.

The insurance policy came back quick enough. Had that on the 4th, only five business days after I submitted all the requested docs and photos.

For the NBTC registration they used the account I created to submit the application, so I could login and track when that was done. Even though the insurance was completed on the 4th, they didn't submit the NBTC application until the 9th. No idea why the delay, but it was only submitted after a couple of emails to the agent asking when they were going to complete that step. Once submitted I had the NBTC registration two business days later.

I don't know when they submitted the CAAT registration as the agent created an account in my name and have yet to give me the login credentials. That was the last of the registration docs I received.

So I'm now legal to fly if anyone should ever bother to ask.

Edited November 16 by forcebwithu

[forcebwithu 4,853]

Got some good drone video of yesterday's H3 run. I'm trusting more and more the awesomeness of the drone's collision avoidance system and its ability to range far and wide and still come home to papa when called.

 

[forcebwithu 4,853]

On 11/16/2024 at 9:20 AM, forcebwithu said:

I finally got the last of my drone registration docs yesterday.

The insurance policy came back quick enough. Had that on the 4th, only five business days after I submitted all the requested docs and photos.

For the NBTC registration they used the account I created to submit the application, so I could login and track when that was done. Even though the insurance was completed on the 4th, they didn't submit the NBTC application until the 9th. No idea why the delay, but it was only submitted after a couple of emails to the agent asking when they were going to complete that step. Once submitted I had the NBTC registration two business days later.

I don't know when they submitted the CAAT registration as the agent created an account in my name and have yet to give me the login credentials. That was the last of the registration docs I received.

So I'm now legal to fly if anyone should ever bother to ask.

 

1 hour ago, KWA said:

He initially got it until the end of his extension which is only 6 weeks away and went along with that, but when he enquired about renewing they said it'll be 3 months at a time.  Non B visa so will extend for a year in January.

After a third reminder email to the agent, I finally got my CAAT login credentials this morning. Turns out they submitted the CAAT registration a day after they did the submission to NBTC. Guess it was too much work to get-r-done at the same time.

I also had a closer look at the approved registration docs. Interestingly the CAAT registration is good for two years.

 

The NBTC registration expiration looks to be tied to my extension to stay through date as it's for slightly more than one year, expiring the day after my extension to stay.

[forcebwithu 4,853]

Just came across this very useful guide to registering and insuring a drone in Thailand.