Gemfan Hurricane 51433
After my last freestyle flight, I was left wanting. My beloved Azure LCP 5040 were no longer up to the task of carrying my drone nicely now that I had a much heavier GoPro onboard (74g vs 158g), so time to try something else.
Given that I wasn't overly impressed with the Ethix Peanut Butter & Jelly props on my motors (Xing-E 2306 2450kV) I thought I'd go the other way and use some higher pitch props.
My first FPV drone (soon to be rebuilt), I had some high kV motors (2700) so I kept dropping the pitch on those until I found something that worked well (Azure JohnnyFPV Props), and I got used to flying lower pitch. Azure always worked well for me, the bent blade design smooths out a lot of movements, which with my shaky hands, was a good thing, so when I built a new drone, they were the first props I looked at, and ended up loving the feel of them.
I figured that higher pitch props might actually be more efficient rather than less (it's always a tradeoff, higher pitch are harder to push through the air, but generate more lift when doing so, the trick is finding the balance point). In this case, efficiency seemed about the same, however, the drone flew a LOT better.
On punchouts, the battery does sag more with the Gemfan's over the Azures, but overall, I found my flight time on both clocked in around the 4 min mark, and I dare say I'm going up to the moon a lot quicker!
As for smoothness, I'm not feeling a lot of difference between them, I'll need more flight time to truly judge, but through the goggles, my flight seemed just as smooth as before (could also be related to the Betaflight tune I'm using). The GoPro footage isn't a great indicator as I have Hypersmooth turned on, yes, I know I could turn that off and see, but laziness wins the day!
Given I've got a bit of a black and blue theme going on with my drone, the choice of colour was obvious, I went with the Skitzo Galaxy style, yeah, it's bling, but hey, I may as well look good while crashing! An added bonus is the Gemfan 51433 are more widely available than the Azure props, which often seem sold out for long lengths of time.