24 June 20264:48464 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
Anyone who has tried to film their own eFoil sessions with a follow drone knows the failure mode. The drone locks on, you carve hard, and it quietly gives up and drifts off tracking a patch of water instead. This episode is a proper test of whether that has finally been solved.
The problem with tracking a foiler
An eFoil is a hard subject. The rider sits above the water with no wake to follow, changes direction faster than a boat, and moves against a background that is constantly shifting and reflecting. The experience reported here after hundreds of attempts is blunt: DJI drones simply cannot hold lock on an eFoil, to the point that riding in a bright yellow sombrero did not help.
What the A1 managed
The test subject is Charlie, normally a Fliteboard Ultra rider, who left his own board on the beach and took out the Lift5 Pro and the LiftX instead. He zigs and zags hard enough that every attempt was expected to fail. Instead the Antigravity A1 kept lock throughout. Rear tracking in follow mode held, orbits worked whenever he slowed enough for the drone to come around him, and it managed forward tracking, which is the hardest thing you can ask of any tracking drone because it has to fly ahead of a subject whose next move it cannot see.
The boards in the shot
The yellow board is the Lift5 Pro and the red-orange one is the LiftX 4’8″. Both run the Lift5 mast with a 160 Camber Pro front wing and a 36 Glide stabiliser, the carving combination this channel keeps returning to. Charlie’s usual Fliteboard Flite Ultra stayed ashore, and the episode is as much about what a committed Flite rider does on a light Lift setup as it is about the drone.
Why it matters if you film alone
Reliable auto tracking is the difference between owning a drone and actually using one. If it holds lock through carves, you can ride your session normally and get aerial coverage without a second person on the shore working the sticks. The music is Ego Autopsy in its Feed the Machine version by Dev Yarusso, and that track along with others is available for use in your own eFoil edits.
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