Today I was flying my drone over a lake (from a boat) and for the first time ever the remote just lost signal with the drone, even though it was flying and wasn't far away. Fortunately I had changed the "return to home" setting on signal loss and set it to just "hover", which is exactly what it did. I was able to turn the remote off and back on again and it re-established a connection. I'm fortunate that worked of course. Does that happen often?

Are there any other settings I should be changing? I also disabled the auto-return-to-home on low battery (I typically don't fly below 30% battery anyways). I also turned off max distance.

I should also mention, it was a bit nerve-wracking trying to find the drone after I lost signal. I had a general idea on where it was, but we weren't able to go back and get it right away. So we took the boat back over and carefully looked for the drone (and hoping it was hovering like it was supposed to).

Hmm, as a beginner pilot myself, I have yet to take it over the water. I just don't want to risk it while I am still getting to know all the controls/settings myself. I know for now if I don't it'll never drop in the ocean, and I guess it could freak out and head out over the ocean on it's own and never come back lol...but thankfully I haven't had any weird mishaps so far. One day I was near some power lines and it tended to drift a bit on it's own, but that's about it.

How far away was it when it lost signal?

Good call you saved your Mavic with that , if your flying low over water it's preferable to turn off VPS . Always expect the unexpected to happen although you would think radio signal would not be lost so close to water, it's a lesson for us all, you just never know.

it seems as though weather conditions like humidity / fog  have effects on radio signal.
Wind does not per se but can bring quick changinf weather situations about.
It seems temperature also has an effect on radio signals and also apparently the electromagnetic noise from motor boats.

This info found in some research online - any  one have first hand experiance or knowlageable opinions?

Pumavic Posted at 2017-8-12 10:59
Hmm, as a beginner pilot myself, I have yet to take it over the water. I just don't want to risk it while I am still getting to know all the controls/settings myself. I know for now if I don't it'll never drop in the ocean, and I guess it could freak out and head out over the ocean on it's own and never come back lol...but thankfully I haven't had any weird mishaps so far. One day I was near some power lines and it tended to drift a bit on it's own, but that's about it.

How far away was it when it lost signal?

good for u pumavic. stay away from water as long as you can - till you have learned what you can to reduce yr risk over water.

Tonight for the first time i have seen research about temperature and humidity and electromagentic noise from motor boats and the effects they have on radio waves - which now seems to possibly explain some video issues i get sometimes, which no one can explain - and also can help understand why sometimes people lose their drone over water.
wind is another factor on 2 levels
level 1 is wind strength itself
level 2 is that it can bring about changing humidity and changing temperatures quite quickly which might be causing conflict in data between barometer and gps - perhaps this incongruent data trips the gps and is part cause for atti jumping in

Just to verify, you were sure that it was the RC signal lost in that case, right? If it was, it might be the signal had been interrupted. Besides your settings, I would also suggest that you need to pay attention to the battery, if the battery is in critical low power, the drone would be forced to landing and could not be cancelled, if you still had not found the location of the drone, it might land into water. So please fly with caution. We don't recommend flying the drone over water.