ArtistFirst
lvl.4
Flight distance : 986716 ft
United States
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I just wanted to say that with the bird that DJI just sent me, I went to fly for the second time yesterday.
First, the first time it wouldn't let me record a home point with the RC and I tried with 3 different devices all now running the GoApp 4 and it would not let me set a home point no matter how I tried. I figured "must be a glitch, I have the homepoint anyway."
Brought it home. This was literally a 5-6 minute "does the bird fly and take nice vid" test which it does on both occasions.
Cut to few days later when I have all my bats charged and a real day of shooting planned.
I go to the Lake Hollywood, crystal clear day and I've been wanting to get some shots of the Hollywood Sign and the LA dam.
At one point when I'm flying near the sign I had walked over a few feet and I wanted to change my HP and I try to set it at the home point the usual way, MC, click button with guy, but it says "homepoint not recorded". I had plenty of sats and my downlink was perfect. Just wouldn't record a home point.
Then, I fly it back and see if I reset, have it closer, anything, "can I record a new home point"?
The answer was no and I stupidly decided "whatever, it's still recording the HP when it takes off, I'll call support when I'm done and we will see what they have to say".
On my 3rd bat, this happened: I decided again to try and see if it's working yet, not wanting to be dealing with a faulty Phantom that I JUST got back" and I try to set the HP again and it sets it at the bird, and oh great, now I have no HP if it goes out of range and tries to RTH.
I immediately get nervous and manually bring the bird home. It was a real sunny day and I had about 55 percent and so I wasn't really worried but somehow or another I lose visual while returning home and I admit I start to panic. I am not used to flying this location and for some reason there wasn't locate a landmark or something to figure out how to visually spot it.
Thankfully a couple people that were helping me from the park and had been hanging and watching the whole time had a visual on it (that I lost while looking at the software trying to figure out where I was because the RTH was sending it back to the Hollywood sight).
Once I got the visual, my battery percentage wasn't that low but for whatever reason I'm panicking a little and so I put it in sport because it's about a minute until it was going to auto-RTH because of where it was and the distance from where it thought home was.
I think I'd be able to break the failsafe with the sticks or a cancel but I wasn't sure and because I wasn't sure I'm flying that thing to me like if I don't goodbye.
With 4 seconds left before it was about to auto engage RTH and return to the Hollywood sign, I hand caught the legs and killed the motors.
But phew. That was odd.
The worst part, the call to DJI.
Dji,
You guys need to stop putting people with a manual in front of them and no idea about the birds you serve so well to people at call centers in India or wherever that not only have never probably flown one of these things and if so, are lucky the bird survived.
The first guy was so bad at understanding the issue that he LITERALLY didn't understand the question. This is "DJI Technical Assistance" we are talking about.
I'm saying to the guy "how do you not understand what I'm saying. I can't be more clear."
And he would return with (after obviously reading his little manual) "sir the HomePoint is set when you take off".
Me: "yes sir, I know that which is why I was flying at all. What I am saying is that I can't set a new homepoint". He says "you can't set a new homepoint while you're flying". At this point I know the guy knows literally less about flying a DJI piece of gear that any flier I know so I kindly ask for a level 2 tech not knowing if there is one.
A guy comes on with the same amount of knowledge as the above guy, then has the same amount of knowledge. Literally knew nothing but what he was reading slowly. Mind you, there were breaks of 10 minute and more several times to either go read or ask someone else, not sure what was happening during these breaks.
Now I look, and because there was 16 people in the cue when I started the call and it's been 1:46 (1 hour and 46 minutes, the time it took me to gather my stuff at the site, grab lunch to go, bring it home, eat it and I'm still not even with a person that understands the problem even, let alone someone that can fix it.
Finally, and without hope, I ask for a third guy. By the way, I was told there are not "level 2 techs" which I was happy he said yes when I asked but he just knew he wasn't going to be able to help.
The third guy was the first and only person that would acknowledge that he understood the issue but even that took some coaxing because he asked "Why would you ever need to change the ordinal home point" and of course I answered with "there are literally more answers than I have time to say but off the cuff, if something strange happens and I lose my homepoint (exactly what did happen). I say what if I'm in a boat and the boat is moving, I would like the bird to know where I am. What if I just want to move the homepont? How about I'm shooting a car commercial and I end up a mile away from where the bird is".
Well the answer to that is DJI, in their infinite wisdom have allowed us to set honepoints at the bird or the RC for various reasons and I even bought an iPad that HAD LTE for accurate home points and you don't even need GPS if you have wifi because it will use triangulation to make a, not as good homepoint, but one none-the-less.
His final response was "I don't know. That's a tough one (no it isnt, it's pretty easy I'm thinking but do you know why or a way to fix it I ask him) and he says these words "Well word told not to offer this, but maybe roll back your firmware that you were using when it worked".
I informed him that I have always been a proponent of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and since the crash (and by the way, they sent me back a refurb, not a repaired. bird which is 100% fine with me as long as it shoots as well as my last one which I'm happy to say it does but for this not so small issue.
I told him I would happily roll back the bird if I could roll back to the old app but I can't do the other and this guy (who mind you is the guy that knows the most so far) tells me there is no matter on whether to balance the software and the bird firmware with each other. I told him even if he was right, which I'm pretty sure it isn't (my bird came to me from the factory with the latest firmware and someone else's name for the bird) and so I decided I better get the GoApp4 as my Mavic is coming and it says "all 4s and above must be on GoApp4" on some not too distant future.
Sooo, the moral of the story is I thought of this thread. I remember thinking "this guy seemed to know what he was doing. His story is odd". I swear as this was happening to me, I was thinking of this thread.
So now what? I'm hoping someone from DJI (as the people that post here from DJI) have at a minimum a good understanding of the birds and sometimes a fantastic one.
I am sorry to publicly bash the support I got on the phone but if It means I have to set up an appointment from 3 days from now, I'd rather that than get zero or wrong info which is all I got after a couple hours on phone.
You can't just call something technical support and it becomes that. The people need some knowledge. I have gotten some good people on support in the past but the above happened and I understand that you guys are probably having trouble hiring people with the know-how at the demand that is probably growing from the amount of units sold. Is this the actual culprit for the roll out of the Mavic being so slow?
My fear is that people with less knowledge than myself are actually listening to these people. The first guy told me you can't set a new HP which if you were a new flier and ended up in this position, you would have no idea that this was a malfunction.
My next question is what now? I have exhausted support to even to get them to understand this rather benign but dangerous issue. So what now? Hopefully I'll be able to figure it out.
Just thought I'd let you know the same exact thing happened to me. It set a HP at the bird, I was unable to set a new one and if I lost connection, it would have gone and landed itself on a mountain and hopefully not in a tree.
Not cool. The shots did look AMAZING though. I'll post the shoot later. Beatiful day for the Hollywood Sign. |
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