Phantom_menace
lvl.2
Flight distance : 880285 ft
United Kingdom
Offline
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I have a phantom 3 standard that I've made 30 very successful flights with over about 6 months building up my trust and confidence with it. However- yesterday I had an odd flight that nearly lost me the drone and has hugely knocked my confidence.
I flew the drone from the top of a big local hill. It had a home lock at takeoff and as per all flights I seem to have to calibrate compass before it will let me fly. It took off with 8 satellites locked.
I flew it away from me for 350m, backwards to capture a great zoom out. I then flew it straight back and over my head letting it go just out of sight, then rotated round about 45 deg to fly a triangular course back. I flew another 250m this way. As it was out of site and some trees were between me, I quickly got a weak transmission and video loss, (quicker than usual so maybe some interference at this site?) so tried to return home. But what happened next has baffled me. The weak signal quickly degraded to a red light on the remote and a complete loss of signal. The app said 'aircraft disconnected'
I kept trying to activate RTH but it gave time out errors. RTH is set at 30m which is much higher than the trees there, and it was set as the action for signal loss in the app.
So it was disconnected, and it didn't fly back to me. And I didn't know where it was. I ran around to where I thought it was last heading in case I could re-establish a link, but had no luck.
After 20 mins I assumed it was lost or in a tree, and felt really bad, but by huge chance and luck, some other walkers came all the way back up the hill to tell me they had seen it fly over them and it's now in a field. They showed me where, and sure enough 250m away from it's home point, it had landed itself in a field and was sat there ready to fly again. It was pure chance it was ok as 3 metres less it would have tried to land on trees.
So I'm baffled, why didn't it try to return to home? I downloaded the DAT files and looked for clues but can't see anything.
The home point seems perfectly stable through the flight and is where I started. There are no errors except lots of weak signal errors near the end. Then an auto landing signal. But no RTH notification.
I'm certain it was set to RTH as I used that on the previous flight and I tried it on a test flight as soon as I retrieved the drone and it worked perfectly.
I'm bothered by this as I don't know if I did something stupid, or if the drone malfunctioned.
Can anyone offer any clues?
Cheers
Paul
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