Origins
Let’s Drone Out was conceived by Dom "Voice of Doom" Robinson along with Jack, as a way to build up voice talents for commentary at Team MiniAirshow events. Starting out as a weekly live radio talk show on TTNS, the shows were always recorded interactively in front of a live online audience, maintaining strong community engagement with the UK FPV scene.
While LDO changed style and focus over time, it kept FPV enthusiasts at its core and kept the weekly live-recorded, online-interactive, audio-first podcast as its biggest contribution to the UK and global drone hobby community.
Listenership
Over a decade of production, episodes accrued more than a million listens across the various platforms. Throughout its run it maintained a core community of over a thousand listeners and contributors, with a peak global reach of almost 10k.
Beyond its own community, LDO was recognised as the second best UK drone podcast (tenth globally!) by Feedpod. It was awarded fourth place in a 2019 review of drone podcasts by Anmol Techzone. Seventh place was awarded to the series in the 2016 selection of Top Drone Podcasts by Sky Tango.
Hosts
LDO was hosted by a rotating cast of regulars over the years - each with different specialisms, interests and links to the wider drone community.
Notable Guests
The crew got to speak to hundreds of guests from across the FPV and drone world on the show, including content creator Joshua Bardwell, tricopter legend David Windestål, Cleanflight progenitor Dominic Clifton, troubleshooter extraordinaire Lee Schofield, FPV entrepreneur Tommy ummagawd Tibajia, and Queen of giant drone racing and 3D flying Zoe Stumbaugh.
Production
The show used a classic podcast format, led by regular hosts and often interviewing a special guest or discussing one or two focal topics. Over time the crew built up a collection of hints, tips and gotchas to help ease in guests who were often new to the experience in a time before the dominance of Zoom and Teams calls.
LDO recording tech started with a couple of mics in Jacks bedroom. In order to bring a global network of guests into a live stream, an early hack involved piping Skype (RIP) through Potato and BUTT into Sharpstream's Icecast broadcast servers. This evolved over time to improve the audio quality, host flexibility and guest experience.
Live on thethursdaynightshow.com’s internet radio stream, before LDO had its own home.
Moved away from the musical TTNS to form its own short-lived PoweringOn talk internet radio station.
Started being recorded live on YouTube via Google Hangouts on Air, through to Hangouts’ retirement.
A brief stint recording over Discord with OBS, which was a struggle to maintain across different host availability each week.
Settled on StreamYard - taking advantage of a single cloud instance with assets and keys available to all hosts, and even auto-uploads of local audio recordings from each guests browser.
After the live recording, episodes were manually edited to meet podcast platform requirements, published on SoundCloud and released as an RSS feed proxied by various podcast platforms from iTunes to YouTube Music. In the early days, this was done by Anaseed and later by Peter Hyams Music.
Beyond the Weekly Show
Alongside the regular Thursday episodes, LDO ran the LDO Drone Games, and brought the crew together in person for the LDOhno and LDOhnonotagain meetups. The show also had road trips, live streams and meetups at national events and UK flying spots.
Funding
Early on, LDO was supported by sponsors including polymer frame specialists Fossilsstuff, and UK R/C distributors RadioC and i-Drone.
To ensure independance, this was phased out, although other individual direct donations via PayPal continued to help massively as part of full financial picture. YouTube Adsense and Superchats were trialed, but the admin burden of complying with the US tax rules made this unviable. Patreon proved to be the most sustainable way for the community to keep the show going, with supporters including;
- Art Faulkner
- Mikey Dread
- David Lockhart
- Sam Dharma
- Greg Spencer
- Wynne Davies
- Carlos Campos
- Daniel Carboni
- Dom Robinson
- Daniel Upton
- Martin Rye
- John Bertram
- Bludz FPV
- Clive Easton
- Ferdi Evers
- Neil Cody
- Stephen Howell
- David Myers
- Fraser Steen
- ARI3S
- Wacky Wez
- Martian McFly
- Gabe Colon
- Caroline Tyler
- Lewis Chapman
- Ben Scarboro
- Andrew Lawrence
- Paul Murray
- Wakusei
- Steve and Gemma Gladding
LDO's everlasting thanks goes out to all the many patrons who kept the podcast in production.
After producing a decade of weekly episodes, a string of patrons reported having to regretfully cancel their financial support due to wider economic pressure. Meanwhile the hosting costs ballooned for the production, eventually reaching a tipping point where the edited audio podcast was no longer viable. Only a couple of further YouTube-only episodes were made. With the show no longer reaching the majority of its listenership, the production of Let's Drone Out came to an end on September 11th 2025.
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