The grammar of the battlefield has changed. As the Russia-Ukraine war has shown, tanks and warships worth hundreds of millions of won grind to a halt before a single FPV drone costing only a few hundred thousand won. Beyond filming, facility inspection, and safety diagnostics, FPV (First Person View) drones have become the unmanned platform expanding its reach fastest of all — extending all the way to the front lines of industry and national defense. Yet people who can actually build and operate these drones themselves remain rare, precisely because FPV drones are a concentrated fusion of mechanical, electronic, and radio-frequency technology.
『FPV Drone Bible』 is a book for professionals in every field standing at that barrier to entry. The book's greatest value lies in bringing together, in a single volume, the entire process of dissecting the complex machine that is an FPV drone piece by piece — in the order laid out in the table of contents — and then reassembling those components back into a complete aircraft. This learning system, which starts from the operating principles of each individual component and moves through assembly and setup to hands-on flight training, is an approach with few precedents either in Korea or worldwide, and it is also why the book's English edition, 『FPV Drone Essentials』, has been well received by readers on Amazon in the United States.
Author Kwon Yong-sang taught himself FPV drones in 2015, at a time when there was not even reference material to consult, commuting three hours round trip to a hobbyist club and completing his first aircraft in six months. That daunting experience carried forward into a wish that "at least those who come after me won't have to go through the same trial and error," bearing fruit as Korea's largest community, 'FPV Drone Korea,' and three books. In 2018, Korea's first specialized FPV book, 『FPV Racing Drone Bible (FPV 레이싱 드론 바이블)』, became a bestseller and was selected as an Excellent Book in the Liberal Arts category of that year's Sejong Book Awards. When the author decided to discontinue it rather than pass along outdated information during a period of rapid technological change, an unusual phenomenon followed: used copies began trading for more than ten times the cover price. In 2023, 『FPV Drone Bible』 was rewritten from a blank page, and now, three years later, the fully revised 2026 edition — capturing the full sweep of the technology's transformation — has arrived.
The past ten years were the period in which FPV drones crossed a generational divide, moving from analog video technology to digital communication methods, and this book captures the full arc of that change from beginning to end. It organizes everything into a single flow, from the basic principles of analog systems to the latest digital systems, but the writing goes further than simply listing assembly steps — it takes great care to help readers fundamentally understand the interaction between components and the flow of signal and current. Once these principles are internalized, readers can design and build their own aircraft with confidence even as equipment changes or is discontinued. An abundance of photos, graphics, and 3D modeling material lets readers visually follow the wiring and assembly process, further enhancing the book's practicality.
This book is not the output of a single author but a ten-year project shared by the author and the publisher. Through his 'Mastering FPV Drones' training course, the author personally taught countless beginners and repeatedly folded the sticking points they encountered back into the manuscript, while review by numerous field experts secured its technical reliability. On top of this, dozens of experts across many fields — including the president of the Korea Model Aviation Association, a national FPV drone racing team member, a former Republic of Korea Special Forces commander, university professors, and practitioners from the fire department, police, and navy — vouch for the book's value with their endorsements, spanning drone sports, filming, industry, military and public safety, and academia.