my buddy keeps telling me i need a landing pad and i keep telling him the ground is free. but i did have one situation last summer where i landed in some tall grass and got a bunch of debris in the motors, had to spend like 20 minutes cleaning everything out before i felt okay flying again. so maybe he has a point. the ones ive seen are anywhere from like $12 to $60 and i genuinely cannot tell what the difference is. is there some feature im missing or is it basically just a colored circle on the ground. also curious if anyone uses them in wind, like does it just blow away before you can even land on it

Get one, seriously. The cheap ones are fine, I have a $15 one from amazon that folds up tiny and the only difference with the expensive ones seems to be material thickness and whether it has the ground stakes included. Mine doesnt have stakes so on windy days i just put my bag on one edge and stand near the other. its not perfect but works well enough. the bigger benefit for me honestly isnt even debris, its that i always know exactly where im landing and the drone's downward sensors dont freak out over weird ground textures

yeah the wind thing is real, had mine blow away once when a gust came through while i was mid-flight. pretty embaressing watching it tumble across a field. most of them come with little pegs you hammer into the ground but i never remember to bring a hammer so i just got in the habit of doing a low hover first to flatten it down a bit before actually landing. kind of defeats the purpose a little but whatever it works. for the price difference i dont think you need to spend more than $20 honestly unless you're doing paid work and want the bigger 50cm size