After having countless issues with the Newbeedrone Lionbee AIO, I decided to build new mounts for a standard AIO, improved camera, gps and antenna mounts.

My goal was to build a long range single 18650 drone that maximizes flight time/range. To accomplish this, I had to sacrifice as much weight and complexity as possible. I had bought a Lionbee  with the hopes of using its 800mW VTX, but I had nothing but problems. My first board had a damaged ESC (I even tried swapping the mosfets but no luck) and second board immediately burned out the VTX after raising to 800mW and fell out of the sky. So with left over motors, camera, frame and gps, I set off to build my own flavor of a long range build.

I originally started by re-using the battery mount clips and print from the lionbee, but quickly found out that power and reliability of an insertable battery made me uncomfortable, so I attached an XT30 to my 18650. I then proceeded to build a 25.5x25.5mm mount for the lionbee frame, moved the VTX antenna to the back, and placed the GPS on top of the camera. This was one of my biggest complaints about the lionbee design (besides it not working for me). The VTX antenna placement made it unreliable when flying away and the mounting design (and flimsy plastic) made the antenna prone to breaking/bending. I also didn't like the idea of placing screws directly into the carbon so I used M2 nuts and longer screws.

I used a spare Matrix II board from BetaFPV with a 400mw VTX. To my surprise, every flight I was able to push my range further and further. 600m, 1km, 2km, 3.3km, then a whopping 4.3km! This was accomplished with a single helical antenna on my HDZero goggles 2 and I just barely made it back. This is the helical antenna I used: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:367500 . I will caution that the newer version of the Matrix II boards from BetaFPV use a new accelerometer, which for some reason cause the GPS rescue to go in the exact opposite direction. I'm not sure if this will be fixed, but I had to use an older Matrix II board that still had the older firmware (2025-12-2 instead of the beta firmware 2026-##).

I've included the STEP and STL files in case anyone wishes to modify these. In the future, I would likely want to swap out the frame for a Crux3 or something similar to reduce the weight and use a standard AIO mount.

Specs:

• Matrix II BetaFPV 5-in-1 (ELRS and 400mW)

• Caddx Baby Ratel2 camera

• NBD m10q micro GPS (I'm not using a compass

• Flywoo finder

• Happymodel EX1202.5 11000kv motor

• Generic RHCP lollipop antenna

• Gemfan 3018 bi blade

• Frame: NBD lionbee frame

• EVE 60A 3000mA battery

Print Settings:

• TPU filament

• 0.2mm layer height

• 2 perimeter layers

• 15-20% infill

• 3-4 perimeters or higher infill around screws