About this site

Mode 2 is a reference site about drones, in English and German. It has a technical core in FPV building and a broader layer around it covering European and German regulation, buying advice and calculators. It is not a shop, and it is not a review site.

How pages here are sourced

Every page is written against a fact brief that separates three things: what is verified and may be stated, what is known to be false, and what is simply not known. The third category is the one that matters. A page here is allowed to say "this is not documented" or "we have not tested this", and several of them do.

Regulatory statements carry the instrument they come from and the date they were checked. Rules change and a rule without a date is a guess, which is why the regulation pages show a check date at the top and cite the provision at the point of use rather than in a general reading list.

• Regulationinstrument and check date, per claim
• Historical claimsarchive capture, per claim
• Test resultsnone, because we have run none

What this site does not do

It does not rank products or publish "best of" lists. Doing that credibly requires testing hardware under controlled conditions, and this site has tested nothing. A recommendation without a test behind it is a guess wearing the clothes of advice, and the FPV community can tell the difference.

What the pages do instead is explain mechanisms: why a number on a spec sheet matters, what constrains it, and how it interacts with the next decision. That is transferable. A ranking of this season's motors is not.

There are currently no affiliate links anywhere on this site. If that changes, every one of them will be marked on the page it sits on, and this paragraph will say so. What will not change is that a commercial relationship never decides what a page says, which is easy to promise here because no page recommends specific products in the first place.

The domain has a history, and it is not ours

From roughly 2013 to 2020, mode-2.com belonged to Mode 2 FPV, a maker of carbon FPV frames run by Brian Welch. The Ghost, Shredder, Kilowatt and Splinter frames were built and flown widely enough that links to those product pages are still live on Thingiverse and RotorBuilds today. The site went offline around 2020 and the domain was re-registered in July 2026.

This site is not a continuation of that business and has no connection to it. We do not own the brand, the designs, or any part of what that company was. What we have done is keep the old links working and write an archive that documents those frames from what actually survives, which is a set of Wayback captures and a Thingiverse profile. Where the record is thin, the archive pages say so instead of filling the gap.

That archive is worth having for one reason in particular: Mode 2 FPV released its frame designs under the GNU GPL v3. A commercial carbon frame maker opening its geometries was unusual then and is unusual now, and the files are still out there.

Both languages, same substance

The German pages are written in German rather than translated from the English. They carry the same facts, in their own sentences, with German sources where the point is national. A page that is rich in one language and thin in the other is a bug here, not a roadmap.

The archive is the deliberate exception. It exists in English only, because the sources that cite those pages are English, and a German twin would compete with the original for the same citation while telling a German reader nothing extra.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it is worth more to us than it is annoying. That goes double for the archive pages, where the people most likely to know are the people who owned the hardware. Several of those pages name exactly what they could not establish, and any of them would be improved by someone who has the missing document.