steve_in_TX
lvl.1
Flight distance : 112871 ft
United States
Offline
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Just an update here. If you are using an Android phone, there are obvious things that you should do. Putting the phone in "airplane mode" while flying the Spark is one of them. However, I've discovered there are other things that are having an effect on the range and video signal dropping out.
Shut down/disable/uninstall any other software on the phone that may be constantly trying to access network services. Facebook is a big one.
Increase the camera buffer from the default 2G to 8G if your phone has the memory. And, clear the buffer before every flight.
If your phone has an SD memory expansion card, make sure it is a "fast" memory card. It appears that when I bought my phone, the sales people fudged on my SD expansion card and put in a slower card than the phone specs called for. That problem has been fixed.
Put the camera/video in Manual mode, and run the ISO speed and Frames-Per-Second as slow as you can get away with. I try to run mine at 100 ISO and 60 Frames-Per-Second. I'm not worried about the video quality coming back to the controller sice any pics or video I take will be stored on the SD card in the drone in HD mode.
People have suggested that you have a formatted SD card in the drone to remedy range and video drop out problems. However, this didn't seem to help me. However, when running in the default 5.8ghz mode, you really need to be line-of-sight with the drone since the shorter wavelength of 5.8 doesn't penetrate obstacles as well as 2.4ghz.
I can't put my finger on any clear winner, but the combination of all my suggestions above has increased my range from about 200 meters to over 500 meters. This is still far short of the claimed 2 kilometers, but I'm still working on it.
I still can't get the fly safe database to update.
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