I took my Mavic Pro out for a flight two days ago in Wisconsin. Weather here was cold (mid 30s F) and cloudy, but the air was calm. I launched from a parking lot next to a school with a ton of wide open space around me. I flew for around 10m without any difficulties and landed. I relaunched, flew for another 10m and had a few issues with a loss of HD, even though the drone responded perfectly. So, I flew the drone back to me to land it and change batteries. When the Mavic was less than 10 feet away and no more than 4 feet off the ground, I lost signal completely.

Presumably, since it was already "home", RTH didn't kick in. Unfortunately, since I couldn't connect to it, I had to wait until the battery ran out and it automatically landed. Right before it landed, the controller reconnected, but that took several minutes and the drone had already initiated the low-battery landing.

Any ideas why it abruptly lost the signal when the drone was so close? Any suggestions on how to land the drone in that scenario? Any thoughts on what I could / should have done differently?

Thanks!

-Sean

Check out page 16 of the Mavic Manual about the RTH Safety Notices. It mentions some actions which are distance based.

Hello Sean, did you adjust the antenna when the signal lost?
Possibly you ran into interference in that area.
Please test more to see if there's any further issue.

Peut Posted at 2016-12-26 10:40
Check out page 16 of the Mavic Manual about the RTH Safety Notices. It mentions some actions which are distance based.

Yup, I read that. And, page 16 says, "Aircraft automatically descends and lands if RTH is triggered when the aircraft is within a 16 ft (5 m) radius of the Home Point."
I'm fairly confident the aircraft was within 5m of the Home Point, although I didn't actually mark the ground. So, when the the aircraft lost the signal, I would have expected it to trigger the RTH. And since it was already within 5m of the Home Point, I would have expected it to just land. But it didn't land until the low battery warning triggered.

DJI Mindy Posted at 2016-12-27 03:34
Hello Sean, did you adjust the antenna when the signal lost?
Possibly you ran into interference in that area.
Please test more to see if there's any further issue.

Hi. I did not adjust the antenna after initial setup. And I was in the middle of a wide-open parking lot, next to a playground and a one story school building. No large trees for at least a block. Nothing else that I would expect to cause interference.

That said, I will continue to keep an eye on things. Any recommendations on making sure it lands in that scenario?

Thanks!

-Sean

veghead Posted at 2016-12-28 14:07
Hi. I did not adjust the antenna after initial setup. And I was in the middle of a wide-open parking lot, next to a playground and a one story school building. No large trees for at least a block. Nothing else that I would expect to cause interference.

That said, I will continue to keep an eye on things. Any recommendations on making sure it lands in that scenario?

You can also enter the Image transmission settings to see if there's large signal interference around.