Flying my Phantom 4 today in an 11 MPH wind at about 15 degrees to line of flight, possibly gusting to higher values. Flying in Sport mode at full throttle, drone airspeed 41 MPH but, with this tail wind, speed over ground was 51 MPH. But occasionally SOG spiked up to 76 MPH. At those times (I think) I got a voice message from DJI GO saying something like "gimbal at maximum roll angle".

You can see the resulting video here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ekqke4w70e4r5r/gimbal_roll.mp4?dl=0

I quite see that if the drone is hit by a gust it may roll outside the gimbal's correction range. The roll is quite fast for the drone as a whole and might alternatively be the gimbal itself being overpowered by the wind?

What do you think?

Rest of flight had no gimbal problems.

i think the occasional fast roll (banking) due to wind hammering is something the drone handles better than the camera gimbals (i suspect gimbals cant compensate fast rolling).  i would be worried if gimbals kept quitting like seen on video even in normal conditions, but if next flights were uneventful then maybe flying on the edge is not recommendable.

WindSoul Posted at 2017-3-9 14:28
i think the occasional fast roll (banking) due to wind hammering is something the drone handles better than the camera gimbals (i suspect gimbals cant compensate fast rolling).  i would be worried if gimbals kept quitting like seen on video even in normal conditions, but if next flights were uneventful then maybe flying on the edge is not recommendable.

A friend of mine who is a glider pilot says it might be due to the drone flying through a doughnut-shaped thermal.

pedro05 Posted at 2017-3-12 08:22
A friend of mine who is a glider pilot says it might be due to the drone flying through a doughnut-shaped thermal.

Probably.my experiences on tilted camera are somehow different.
I had a weird camera roll while flying in fog. imagine that as soon as i turned towards lake, the camera will recover, but when i turned back towards land the camera will hang on extreme roll, almost like power went off. i tried soft turns, but still the gimbals would just quit.

I also have flown in high winds. by no means stronger than what the drone can handle in p-mode (that is gusting to 10m/s), but high considering the drone had a hard time against the wind and i could hear the motors speeding to compensate. i noticed that in high winds the gimballs can not keep up to maintain the camera horizontal, but that is to be expected and if i recall correctly is mentioned in the manual.

my reply ends here. the rest is about thermals
this only because you talked about thermals. if you wanted to get me hooked you wouldnt have succeeded better.

Air thermals
when sun gets to warm up a patch of land in relatively stale air, a bubble of hot air forms at ground level.
the keyword here is "hot". physics teaches that the molecular kinetic energy in a gas depends on temperature alone.
a temperature increase of say 20+Celsius makes the molecular speeds increase enough such as the borders of patch of land the cold air outside behaves as a solid wall, because its molecules were moving so slow they appear not to be moving at all (in interaction with heated molecules).

when an energized molecule from inside the hot bubble moves radially towards the cold boundary, it hits a wall of seemingly standing molecules and the chances are it will be reflected back towards the  bubble (with little chance to penetrate the denser cold air outside the bubble and get stuck there)

this phenomenon of individual molecules getting reflected back towards the bubble (rather than penetrate into the cold outside) generates two major motions in the bubble:
  * one up, because that is the only way of little to no resistance (down there is the solid ground)
  * one of wrapping around, or funneling or rotation, due to the integrated effect of deflecting each individual molecule from the cold boundary.

as soon as the bubble starts its motion upwards, then the cold air starts to squeeze. at the ground level, the cold squeeze results in cold air penetrating the bubble and getting heated once it enters the hot patch of land. this cold air now heated, can not move backwards outside the bubble, because it just came in due to pressure difference, so will join the updraft.

if the sun keeps fueling it, then now the bubble has it all:
  * an overall upwards direction of draft
  * a consistent wrapping motion at the bottom edge
  * a consistent feeding of air pre-warmed by the funelling at the base of the updraft.

While the air rises, it meets colder air which if it was denser, would exert the same blocking that the cold boundary exerted initially when the funnel was in its infancy, only a bubble. Only that high-altitude air is less denser and while the hot updraft cools, it does not hit the wall but penetrates with ease into less-denser air. at this moment, the anvil shape of the cloud starts to form.

Is a long text to follow, but i hope you enjoyed my little findings on the subject.

I love flying in thermals. When I was young I used to hang glide.  Now I just let my drone do the flying, thermals an all.

Here I am sucked into the doughnut hole.