Ghost: Mode 2 FPV's original racing frame

What survives about the frame that opened the Ghost line, and about the third version that later replaced it, from Mode 2 FPV's own archived pages.

Before mode-2.com became a drone and FPV reference site, the domain belonged to Mode 2 FPV, a US frame maker run by Brian Welch, whose Thingiverse handle is mode2fpv. The company operated roughly from 2013 to 2020, sold carbon frames through its own WooCommerce shop, and released its designs under the GNU GPL v3. The Ghost was the frame that opened its racing line. No Wayback capture of a Ghost shop page with a specification sheet has turned up in the research behind this archive, so this page cannot give you a weight, an arm thickness or a wheelbase for the original frame. What does survive is Mode 2 FPV's own account of what the Ghost meant to its catalogue, published on the site's /open-source-frames/ page and captured on 12 May 2020, plus a later description of a third revision.

What Mode 2 FPV said about the Ghost

On that page, the company described the Ghost as "the frame that revolutionized FPV racing, and inspired heavily by the original Hyperlite Floss." That is Mode 2 FPV's own characterisation of its own product, not an independently verified claim about race results or adoption, and it is presented here as a quotation for that reason. The Hyperlite Floss reference places the Ghost inside the wider freestyle and racing frame scene of the mid-2010s rather than as an isolated design, though nothing further survives on what was carried over or changed.

DesignerBrian Welch, Thingiverse handle mode2fpv
Company activec. 2013–2020
LicenceGNU GPL v3

Later in the line: a third version

The same archived page also describes a later Ghost, redesigned rather than iterated. Mode 2 FPV called it "redesigned from the ground up … our final answer to the Ghost line." That places at least three versions in the Ghost family across the years the company operated: this original frame, the Ghost 2, whose specification sheet survives and is documented separately, and this final rebuild. No dimensions, weight or release date for the third version survive in the captures we have, so beyond that one sentence, nothing else about it is documented.

Where the design files are

Mode 2 FPV released its frame designs, including the Ghost, under the GNU GPL v3, with source files on GitHub and Thingiverse. The GitHub repository was linked from the site but the exact URL was not captured, and the account has not been located independently, so this page does not link to a guess. The Thingiverse profile is real and current: thingiverse.com/mode2fpv/designs. If you built a Ghost from files you downloaded there, or from a mirror of them, that is very likely where they originated.

What this page cannot say

We do not know when the original Ghost was released, how many were made, what it cost, or why Mode 2 FPV eventually stopped operating. The site's last real capture is from May 2020; whether the company closed, was sold or simply stopped updating is not something the archive tells us. If you are trying to identify a Ghost frame by weight or wheelbase, this page will not help; the Ghost 2 page has real figures for the frame that followed it.

Mode 2 FPV, /open-source-frames/, Wayback Machine capture, 12 May 2020.

For the frames that followed in the same open-source catalogue, see the Shredder and its 10-inch revision, or return to the archive overview and the open-source frames page. For how a modern frame is chosen and specified, see frames.