With apologies to Ruko, this one has been grounded on my review desk for way too long. Those who live in Melbourne would commiserate with me for the weeks and months of inclement weather – if it wasn’t raining, it was crazy windy. Sunshine and warmth has been scarce but we have had a respite this past weekend before it descends back into mayhem again for the next ten days. Look out for thunderstorm asthma!
I was really excited for the opportunity to review the Ruko U11Mini 4K Drone. It’s not my first rodeo but it’s been a very long time since I played with one and the ones I played with didn’t have smart phone connectivity.
tl;dr
The Ruko U11Mini 4K is an excellent, highly recommended beginner drone.
The Big Takeaways
Sub-250g Advantage: Weighing 249g, it avoids the most stringent CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) registration and licensing requirements for recreational users, making it exceptionally easy to get airborne legally.
Beginner Friendly: The controls and default Beginner Mode are so intuitive that even a 7-year-old was flying it comfortably in minutes.
Flight Time: The three-battery package offers a generous total of 96 minutes of flight time.
Camera: It captures usable 4K video and 8K stills, though the footage is best in calm, bright conditions.
Verdict: This is a stable, reliable platform and a great value choice for anyone seeking their first aerial camera drone.
Before you fly! CASA Rules and Flying the Ruko U11Mini 4K in Australia
With great flight powers comes with great CASA responsibilities. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) sets the rules on drone flying in Australia. Make sure you familiarise yourself with the rules in the area you intend to fly first!
For Australia, in brief, “You must not fly your drone higher than 120 m above ground level. You must keep your drone at least 30 m away from other people and never fly over another person. You must only fly one drone at a time. Only fly during daylight hours.”
Additionally you need to fly the drone within eyeballs line of sight (not AR goggles or screen).
The U11Mini 4K manual makes a recommendation to fly in open space with a diameter of 10m, at an altitude of 15m for ground obstacle and signal interference avoidance. They also recommend you stay at least 3m above water surface.
Despite the app allowing you to set the maximum flight ceiling to 6km (20,000 feet), I strongly advise you don’t test that out. Nevertheless, the manual says to keep it below 2km for the air pressure sensor to work correctly.
Why the Ruko U11Mini’s Sub-250g Weight Matters
So ok, there is a bit of marketing here, but let’s break it down.
The U11Mini 4K, as the name implies, handles 4K video footage and 8K stills image. The camera is mounted on a three axis gimbal with electro image stabilisation.
It weights 249 gram which is a very specific and very important number, and you will see lots of drones spruiking that magic number.
I can hear you asking why? I didn’t come up with this summary of a summary, the credit goes to /u/imuwild.
But in short, the Canucks back around 2010 – 2014 wanted to know how dangerous it is if a drone clobbers someone over the head. The short answer after a bit of research, was about eighty Joules of energy at impact.
Above 80 Joules you can do some serious injuries. Below that it will hurt but you will walk away.
The maths works out to be, assuming a drone drops from 50 metres in a real world scenario with air resistance, drone blades windmilling, friction and the like, 250 grams is the magic ceiling value. Physics.
The controller uses a 5GHz frequency and a maximum distance of three kilometres in an ideal unobstructed and interference free environment. More importantly, it does not require cellular coverage to work.
Unboxing the U11Mini 4K: 96 Minutes of Flight Time and Essential Gear
Ruko has packed a few things in the box:
- the U11Mini 4K
- controller
- 3 x batteries
- 3 x USB-C controller to phone cables
- 2 x USB-C to USB-A cables
- 8 x spare propellers
- carry case
There are a couple of variants here, with options of one, two or three batteries. Ruko had kindly sent me the three battery option with a rated total flight time of 96 minutes.
Pre-Flight Checks
Before you rush into your Topgun flight suit and play drone hotshot, there are some familiarisation required.
For starters both the controller and the batteries need to be charged up. This could take a few hours to complete. There is an entry in the instruction manual that says four hours from empty to full.
I plugged all my batteries and the controller into my charging brick and left it to run until all the indicators say they are filled up.
There is a cover over the camera assembly. For transit it is taped to the body with some seriously sticky tape. You have to remove it before flying the U11Mini 4K. To protect the assembly and the lens you should put it back on before packing the drone away.
You will also need to download the Ruko app, no login or registration required. There are however, some permissions you have to give in order for everything to work correctly. In particular on Android you do want to give it full permission to write to the media folder rather than limited.
The controller is connected to the phone via USB, with the phone screen being a view finder as well as for some controls. Ruko provides three cables depending on your phone’s connector. The controller itself uses USB-C.
The cable here is cleverly stowed behind the retractable phone mount. It is an easy way to remember to connect your phone:
- pull the phone mount out from the controller body
- unstow the connector
- put phone into the mount
- connect phone to controller
The joysticks for the controller are stowed at the bottom edge, you push on the knob side and it will rotate out enough for you to grab. They need to be screwed into the two sockets on either side of the controller.
At this point, you are almost ready to fly.
Ruko publishes a video to guide you through everything up to the first lift off.
First Flight & Beginner Mode – Easy Flying for All Ages
My 7 year old was incredibly excited when I pulled the drone out, I got some cool dad brownie points for this one.
I used our driveway as the take off point for our first flight. I wanted somewhere a little more contained and sheltered, just to get some lift under our wings so to speak.
Assuming you have done what was in the list in the previous section, the pre-flight checks, then the start sequence is:
- unstow the “wings” of the U11Mini 4K to the flight position (lock S-foil in attack position anyone?)
- long press on the drone to power it on, you will need a musical trill to confirm it is powering on. You will also see the LEDs light up as well.
- press on the power on the controller, you will hear some loud beeps which will continue until the controller finds the U11Mini 4K
- Next is to tap on the controls button on your screen, which switches the app to the camera view of the U11Mini 4K. The app also overlays key details on the screen.
- This is where you have to wait until the U11Mini 4K finds a GPS signal. The icon for it will turn green when it is ready. This can take a little while.
When that is done, you are then ready for the take off.
You can unlock the motors by pushing the two controllers to the 5 and 7 o’clock position. That is left controller to 5 o’clock, right controller to 7 o’clock – inwards. If you are pushing outwards, you are doing it wrong.
Alternatively you can tap on the take off button on the screen, and slide to unlock the motor, then push the left joystick up to take off (or tap to auto take off).
We spent about 15 minutes practising the controls on our driveway. I estimate that based on the battery indicators which is handily visible on the back of the U11Mini 4K. It was down to half charge after Arraiya and I got a feel for the basics.
We then took it up to a nearby school oval, wide open space and no one around so we can crash and burn, I mean, fly and learn. It gets trickier with the open space, it was good that there was barely any breeze to contend with so we were just flying the machine.
It was very much a learning process, with two beginners familiarising with the U11Mini 4K, still figuring out the quirks and understanding what is happening. It was easy for me to teach my daughter about the basics of flying, how the orientation of the drone affects the directions of the control.
After about ten minutes of hovering and basic flight flying, we progressed to flying up and down the cricket pitch to do some more structured flying.
One feature I do really appreciate is the beginner mode that is turned on by default. We decided to fly the drone from the cricket pitch to the equipment playground about 40m away. The U11Mini 4K would only allow us to fly 30m before it flashed on the screen that we have reached the limit for the beginner mode.
It allowed us to fly it back to base though – the center of the cricket pitch.
All in all, the first flights were easy to do. The U11Mini 4K was a relatively steady platform to fly and hover. I got my daughter to keep the U11Mini in a steady hover whilst I took some photos. In the absence of wind, she had little issues keeping it in place. I did notice that the U11Mini has a bit of a tendency to drift to the starboard side (right) on this day.
She quickly got used to gentle nudges of the controls to fly the U11Mini 4K, rather than a pedal to the metal style. Honestly it was impressive – the U11Mini being so beginner friendly, and how quickly my daughter took to understanding how to move the U11Mini 4K in three dimensions. Proud dad moment right there.
More flying the next day
With the light fading fast, we had to call it quits for the day. Besides I wanted to get a microSD card into the U11Mini 4K so I can get some footage of the action.
There was definitely a bit of a breeze on the second day of flying. The drift is a bit more pronounced, and it was also drifting up with the wind. But let’s do a sanity check here, the drone is just 249 grams in weight.
I had an idea of getting some footage of my daughter playing in the playground. Aim high and see what I can manage right? Well, to the surprise of no one, flying a drone vs flying a drone precisely are two very different things. I definitely need to get a lot more than 10 minutes practice in before trying this one again.
On the bright side, the U11Mini 4K is pretty forgiving. Yes we have crashed it a few times and it has survived so far. There are some scratches on the blades but it is par for the course.
It takes a bit of practice to fly using the viewfinder on the phone, but also to keep situation awareness of the overall picture, being aware of obstacles and other dangers.
The U11Mini 4K is not all manual controls, there are some tricks up the sleeves that I will talk about later.
Getting Footage
The controller had some additional buttons where you rest your forefinger, much like on a PlayStation controller.
On the right is a button to trigger a photo on a single tap, or to start recording a video if held down. On the left is controls to pan the camera from up and down.
To help with capturing smoother footage, you can switch the U11Mini 4K to Cine mode. It reduces the sensitivity of the controls in comparison to the normal or sports modes. Honestly I have switched between Cine and Normal mode and it feels sluggish in Cine mode, but I guess that is the point. Slow but deliberate movements for better footage.
The quality of the footage is quite usable. It is not IMAX quality but neither is the price of the unit.
The U11Mini has a slot for a microSD card, and supports up to 64GB size. The website calls for FAT32 formatted card which is not the easiest thing to do in Windows. Thanks Microsoft.
Despite formatting the card to FAT32 using a third party tool, the U11Mini 4K would not recognise it. It throws up a “SD card needs formatting” message, which I could tap on and tell it to go ahead and wipe the card. It proceeded to … not do it.
I ended up on my workstation and give it something else, an exFAT partition, popped it back into the U11Mini 4K and told the app to format it again. This time it came back with a format successful message and all was well.
To give you the angst, just pop a new microSD into the U11Mini and let the app do the work. No need to do what I did and try to be smart.
If you don’t have an SD card, the photos and video gets saved to your phone directly. The manual does say that the video has a higher resolution on the microSD though (4K vs 1080p).
As for still photos, the image quality is so-so. It isn’t the best but far from being unusable.
Other Features
The U11Mini 4K comes with a truckload of features. I am not completely across basic features of your average drone, but the U11Mini seems loaded up to me.
It is important to point out that the U11Mini 4K does not have any obstacle avoidance smarts (or Terrain Following Radar for that matter).
Return to Home (RTH)
I think every GPS enabled drone has this. It records the GPS coordinates of the take off point so that when needed, it will come back home.
On the controller there is a return home function. It is to the left of the mode switch.
By default the return home altitude is set to 20m. You want to set the altitude high enough to clear all obstacles in your flight path. This one is on the pilot.
In a low battery situation, the U11Mini 4K will give a first alert and it returns to 30m above the take off point. It allows you to fly at that height within a radius of 30m.
At the second low battery alert, it will maintain current altitude to the point above the take off point, then descend to the ground.
If the U11Mini 4K loses connection with the controller for more than ten seconds, it will trigger the auto return mode. If the controller restores connection during the RTH, then you can cancel the return home and continue the flight.
I tested the RTH feature a few times, and it works as advertised. The U11 Mini zooms up to the pre-set altitude and takes it’s time cruising back to land. It doesn’t land pinpoint on the take off location, but in my use, within 1.5m of the take off point. That’s good enough for me.
Intelligent Flight Modes Tested: RTH, Follow, and POI
The U11Mini 4K has five preconfigured intelligent flight mode. Rather than relying on the skills (or the lack of in my case) piloting skills, these are designed as value adds.
Route rules: aircraft flies along a flight path marked with waypoints.
GPS follow: aircraft locks onto the user and automatically follow the operator’s movement trajectory for footage
Image follow: aircraft follows the object’s in circle movement to rotate
Point of interest: aircraft is centered on the location set on the app, flying around at a specific distance to shoot.
Gesture: takes pictures or videos according to the steering instructions of different gestures
I got to play with these a little, but I was both time and location constrained so they did not pan out as I had hoped.
In particular with, the image follow function kept coming back with target lost. This one I think was an issue with distance, and I needed to be at least 30m away from the subject.
Similarly with the Point of Interest, I need more practice at getting this to work. However I can say it hovers over my PoI like a champ.
I am looking forward to when we can get longer stretches of sunny weather, so I can really play with these features in depth.
Other Thoughts and Settings
For operating from rough airfields (read: grass, sand or other loose top layer that can be dislodged by the airflow), Ruko provides a “helipad” for take off and landing. This is to provide protection to the propeller when the U11Mini 4K is close to the ground.
I of course, have no idea where I placed mine. I think one of the kids might have borrowed it. But realistically any decent piece of cardboard will do as a replacement.
Gripes
Honestly my only real complain with the U11Mini 4K is how the app handles the SD card. It was not really intuitive.
Could Ruko please package some good weather as well?
Final Verdict: Is the Ruko U11Mini the Best First Drone?
As a beginner drone, the real test was how much effort it would take to get the aircraft in the air. The answer to that was, not very much. Less than ten minutes of watching a video, downloading the app and doing pre-flight checks before the first flight.
What is more incredible, is that a seven year old could set the drone up for flight without help, after just a few exposures to the process. The only part she couldn’t do was to unlock my phone. Over the weekend she has had so much fun just playing with it zooming along the school grounds.
You can get the Ruko U11Mini 4K from their website or Amazon Au. The single battery version (32 minutes flight time) has RRP A$479.99 but discounted to $407.99 at time of publish. My review version with three batteries (96 minutes flight time) has a RRP AA$699.99.
DRN would like to thank Ruko for providing the review unit, this one has been a bundle of fun.
