yesterday at the beach i took off as usual gps and controller signal was good
then i flew out over the water and all of sudden my video and gps signal is lost and the remote says do you want to return to home?

i hit return to home and the controller confirmed it, but i had no idea where it was as the map wasn't updating and a minute or so later, all of a sudden it said it was landing.

so i pushed up to make it go higher and the elevation was getting close to zero meters and i didnt want it to land in the water.

then all of a sudden my video and signal comes back and its about 300 feet up and to the left of me.

can anyone take a look at my log and see if they can tell what happened? this is only maybe my 11th time flying and the first scary issue ive encountered with signal loss. since i was at the beach there was nothing in between me and the drone but air.

im thinking maybe radio interference from the lifeguard tower or a couple sailboats further out in the ocean (maybe 1km out from the beach) could have caused it??

You didn't loose gps because if you did your aircraft would not have come home, a easy lesson here is VLOS you were totally disorientated and were lucky to get your aircraft back, you could also had magnetic interference from where you were standing through remote control.

I looked at your log but it doesn't have anything that made it obvious to me what happened here. What it shows is that -- just as you described -- while you were flying over the water with the Mavic about 900 feet away and roughtly 170 feet above the surface the app stopped recording information, and then about three minutes later it resumed recording with the aircraft now about 300 feet up and almost directly over you.

Since your RTH altitude was only set to 30 meters it appears the Mavic did respond to your throttle and gained altitude even while the app wasn't logging, which probably means that your remote was still connected to the aircraft but the app on your mobile device was frozen. Specifically what model of mobile device and which OS version are / were you using? And have you noticed any problems with the Go app crashing or hanging while you're using it?

Given that your remote appears to have maintained its connection to the aircraft I doubt this was caused by radio interference. It appears to me to be more likely related to your mobile device and / or the Go app.

DroneFlying Posted at 2017-6-3 16:17
I looked at your log but it doesn't have anything that made it obvious to me what happened here. What it shows is that -- just as you described -- while you were flying over the water with the Mavic about 900 feet away and roughtly 170 feet above the surface the app stopped recording information, and then about three minutes later it resumed recording with the aircraft now about 300 feet up and almost directly over you.

Since your RTH altitude was only set to 30 meters it appears the Mavic did respond to your throttle and gained altitude even while the app wasn't logging, which probably means that your remote was still connected to the aircraft but the app on your mobile device was frozen. Specifically what model of mobile device and which OS version are / were you using? And have you noticed any problems with the Go app crashing or hanging while you're using it?

I second this

thank you Andy and DroneFlying!

i haven't had any issues with the goapp before.  i am using DJI Go 4.1.0 (2874)  with an iphone 7 plus. i emailed dji about it and they said they dont review logs in situations like this. is that true ?

I dont understand, if the home point wa log in begining, why the drone was doing RTH in the water? Looks like it loose gps no?

patrickj Posted at 2017-6-5 10:17
thank you Andy and DroneFlying!

i haven't had any issues with the goapp before.  i am using DJI Go 4.1.0 (2874)  with an iphone 7 plus. i emailed dji about it and they said they dont review logs in situations like this. is that true ?

i emailed dji about it and they said they dont review logs in situations like this. is that true ?

As far as I know, yes. I'm assuming that by "situations like this" you mean where the drone exhibited unexpected behavior but wasn't actually lost or damaged, in which case I can't really blame them. Otherwise they'd be overwhelmed with evaluating logs from flights where people where surprised by the behavior even though it turned out nothing was wrong. I'm not saying that was the case here because your log is definitely unusual in my opinion, but I can understand DJI's hesitation in getting involved.

To be honest I expected you to say that you were on Android because Go seems to be a little less reliable on that platform, but given that you were on a supported iOS device I'm even more surprised and puzzled by the behavior you saw. The only thing I can think of to suggest at this point is just fly with extra caution for a while and in particular be conscious of what other apps you might have running that could interfere with the Go app.

Really the best way for me to look into this would be to examine the DAT file for the flight that's stored on your Mavic and I can get a better idea of what happened. If you'd like me to do that then use these instructions to upload the DAT file from the Mavic to your computer, then copy it to DropBox and provide a link to it so that I can download and analyze it.

Pitando Posted at 2017-6-5 11:18
I dont understand, if the home point wa log in begining, why the drone was doing RTH in the water? Looks like it loose gps no?

Did you hit RTH button on the remote controller or on your screen, landing and RTH are very close on screen and I have seen many who taught they had pressed RTH when actually they pressed landing.

hallmark007 Posted at 2017-6-5 11:56
Did you hit RTH button on the remote controller or on your screen, landing and RTH are very close on screen and I have seen many who taught they had pressed RTH when actually they pressed landing.

landing and RTH are very close

Yes.  I have personal experienceQ  Fortunately, I was flying VLOS while demonstrating RTH to a friend. :-)

Pitando Posted at 2017-6-5 11:18
I dont understand, if the home point wa log in begining, why the drone was doing RTH in the water? Looks like it loose gps no?

The log doesn't indicate that the aircraft tried landing over the water, though it's possible that happened during the three minutes during which there are no records. It also might be that given the stressful situation that the OP mistakenly glanced at the VPS height instead of the regular (barometer) height.

For next time, have to hold the rth button to execute a return (rc). Fast press cancels.

DroneFlying Posted at 2017-6-5 13:13
The log doesn't indicate that the aircraft tried landing in the water, though it's possible that happened during the three minutes during which there are no records. It also might be that given the stressful situation that the OP mistakenly glanced at the VPS height instead of the regular (barometer) height.

The log doesn't indicate that the aircraft tried landing in the water

I would tend to agree.  But we don' know what was going on in the time lapse.  Did OP have visual contact during the lapse?  Is that when the AC was landing over water?

Also, there was apparently 12 min of flying after the downlink was restored.  

i did not have visual contact during the lapse. so lesson learned there. i did continue to fly without landing once i found the drone flying above me. i flew within line of sight after which everything seemed normal.

i then flew 3 more flights using 3 separate batteries approx flight times 10-12 minutes each. immediately after this occurred at the exact same location and did not have any issues.

patrickj Posted at 2017-6-5 17:30
i then flew 3 more flights using 3 separate batteries approx flight times 10-12 minutes each. immediately after this occurred at the exact same location and did not have any issues.

i did hit RTH and thats how the drone came back to me. regarding the altitude, wheres the other altitude indicator?
(sorry i had to break up the replies, i was getting an error 'your post contains bad information')

I suspect a remote to device cable issue.  I've been hearing more about cable issues.

My IOS has logged off twice already after the new update.  Never did that before the update.