[secant0give]

To carry a gimbal with a Gopro in it's protective case, which is quite heavy, you will need at least a 450 size quad.
You won't get much flying time with a 2200 pack probably about 4 mins with some margin which with a multi rotor you need. They don't glide and you cant auto rotate one either they just fall like a stone when they run out of juice.

If you are going to fly something around places where you might loose it, like a secluded beach out in the bush or somewhere like that you want a reliable system something that works and works well. The controller needs to be stable even in the howling wind because you don't allways have perfect weather when you get to a great spot to take some footage. In and breezy or lumpy conditions you will need some reserve power or you'll crash, ask me how I know

You really don't want to go for cheap motors because if you loose one it's all over and there goes your expensive camera. they need to run smooth and be well balanced or your film will have jello, it will look wavy. Also multi rotor-flight controllers don't like vibrations. You really need to mount them on vibration isolation mounts, stretched o rings work well

Speed controllers like wise need to be good ones and if you want good control you'll want ones with good firmware designed for multi rotor use like the Afro series from HK they are reasonably priced as well and work a treat!!

If you look at my SK450 thread http://forum.rcflyingclub.com/showthread.php?tid=1226
You'll see I started out with a HK ARF SK450 but soon discovered the short comings of using the KK2 flight control board. It's hard to tune and there are a bunch of features that you'd like for FPV that you just don't get with the KK2 and it flies with nowhere near the locked feel that you experience with the HK mega 2.7 Autopilot. I can't comment on any other flight controllers as I haven't used them so they are all unknown territory to me. I just know how nicely this one works.

I'll post the full parts list for the camera platform I'm using on the SK450 thread shortly.

I quite like the Mobius action cam it works really nicely as long as the air is not too lumpy youll get great shots but for more ambitious conditions you need something with onboard image stabelisation like the sony action cam or the new gopros otherwise you film will be really bouncy you can clean this up with a good video editor but it will loose resolution.

The Mobius cam costs about $80 and is very light and small compared to a Gopro the new Gopro is over $400 the Sony action cam is about the same price as a Gopro but a little lighter and has a but better shape for airborne use it's not as tough tho'

here's some video shot with the Mobius I really like this camera if it had stabalisation it would be AWESOME. This was a very still morning you can see how nicely the HK megga 2.7 flight controller works it's as stable as you'd ever get
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJTWMqoGGKo



Here's a comparison between the Mobius and the Sony the before shots were taken with the Mobius and the after with the sony

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvK53hCnvi4


With FPV the receiver and receiver antenna is probably the most important thing as far as the video link goes. I think the Skyzone 5.8 gHz RX-TX FPV sets that HK sells are pretty good in the 500-600 mW power range. With the Circular polarised antennas they should get you anywhere line of sight in McCoy park with no trouble at all. Out in the bush where it's nice and quite as far as radio noise they will get you out a couple of Ks no probs and with high gain receive antennas much further than that.
I have tried some really cheap VTXs and they are a wast of time you need a good video link to fly FPV cheep dipole antennas are aslo a waste of time and since they are linear polarised multi path makes them almost unusable near anything that will reflect the VTXs signal.

I use a separate camera for FPV that way it makes it easy to take the HD camera off and put it on another plane with out un wiring things and it means I can still fly fpv with out the HD recording

I like the "Run Cam sky" FPV camera it's a pretty good little unit with excellent dynamic range better than the cheap cameras which go completely white out if you aim them at the sun, It's pretty scary when that happens for the first time

Here's a video test in a particularly noisy environment and close to buildings and metal roofs which cause major multi path issues and it works OK cause I'm using circular polerised. I'm making some higher gain antennas and putting them on a 4 way diversity box to see how much I can improving the video link but it's certainly flyable as it is. It aslo gives you an idea of how the run cam sky has reasonable dynamic range. Some cheaper cameras would go completely white assoon as any sun gets in the picture and the bright skye would be super bright and the shadow would be black, you'll see what I mean in the last clip.

Recording was done with a little SD card ground recorder from HK. The reason it drops a couple of frames is the recorder not the video link but the static is caused by it being a crappy place to fly FPV and is an artefact of the video link. Of course this is what I use to fly it the HD comes from another camera usually I don't record the video link unless I want to test or compare it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3OCGMD1Opg