I'm pretty new to the drone world and I was looking at a project that can be done in stages. I spend a lot of time in the woods just exploring and making my own maps. It's a lot of fun but would be helpful is a sort of "eye in the sky" to help get a better idea of what's around me.

Essentially, I'm looking to be able to get a visual idea of what's around me and collect GPS coordinate data of particular objects/landmarks.

A drone would work well for that but I don't have almost $1,000 to drop at a go so I'm open to the idea of building something piecemeal.

I'm alright with a soldering iron and happy to try and build something myself.

The big things I'd need would be operating range (both in terms of distance and flight time), a locator of some kind (in case it goes down I can find it in the brush), and a GPS sensor to be able to give accurate GPS coordinates.

Are there any build guides for anything like this or builds that I could modify with different parts?