Five courses laid out simultaneously, support infrastructure, gate storage shed, charging hub, observer berm. Co-located so you can rotate between layouts in 10 minutes, not the 30-min weekend strike-and-restake of a single shared pasture.
01 · Site selection
Rural acreage in the Midwest is cheap. Picking the right 20 acres for a drone-racing facility is mostly about avoiding bad terrain, not finding perfect terrain.
Pilot needs visual on the entire course at all times (FAA Part 107 + your safety). Pick land that's flat or gently sloping. Avoid bowls, ridges, dense tree blocks.
No power lines crossing overhead. No cell tower within 500 m (CT base stations swamp 5.8 GHz video links). Class G airspace below 400 ft AGL — check the FAA UAS map.
Truck-passable road to the site for hauling gates + batteries. 120 V utility power within 100 m of the pilot station — for charging, weather station, optional LED course lighting.
100 m clear margin to nearest road, livestock area, occupied building, or neighbor property line. Crashes happen; their kinetic energy must die before it leaves your land.
02 · Master plan
Top-down site plan. Five course zones color-coded; support infrastructure clustered south by the access road. Wind-prevailing layout puts the speed corridor running north-south.
03 · Walk the zones
The full physical-qualifier practice course. Six sections — start, fast straight, hairpin, elevation pair, slalom, finish. 620 m lap. Permanent install with two elevation gates on cement-pier stands.
200 m straight corridor running N–S to align with prevailing wind. 8 gates evenly spaced at 25 m. For maximum-speed runs and top-end PID tuning. Wind tunnel where you cross check headwind vs tailwind times.
8-gate alternating slalom + tight hairpin. For low-speed precision, continuous yaw rate, lost-detection recovery. Detector torture-test — gates close together force constant handoff.
6-gate hex loop. Constant heading change, no straights — detector never loses gates. Where you debug new policies, recover after major changes, regain confidence after a crash.
Open 200×150 m pasture with two portable gates that float wherever you want them. For one-off experiments — testing a new sensor, recording new training data, evaluating a controller under custom geometry. The lab bench of the facility.
04 · Support infrastructure
Don't scatter buildings across 20 acres. Cluster them on the south edge so power runs are short, the access road serves all of them, and the pilot station has line-of-sight to every zone.
05 · Build phases
Phase 0 buys you the first flight. Phase 3 is the polished result. Don't try to build it all at once — fly between phases to validate as you go.
06 · Long-term operations
Solar-charged LED strip on each gate's blue border, IR-only mode. Lets you collect "lighting variation" training data the AIGP physical qualifier may impose.
Davis Vantage Pro2 on a 6 m pole at the pilot station. Logs wind speed, direction, temp, humidity. Every flight's run gets weather-tagged for later analysis. ~$700.
Repaint UV-faded gates each March. Re-stake after winter heave. Mow before each flight day. Replace TPU iso grommets when they crack (annual).
Phase 0 (week 1) gets you flying on Zone D for $300. Phase 3 (week 6) gives you all five zones, four buildings, and a full operations setup for ~$8,500. Total cost is less than a single Patriot interceptor pays for. The facility outlasts the qualifier.