I recently tried to fly my drone to a friend in my neighborhood. Once I got down to a low angle I lost signal. While you can usually count on signal integrity in an open field, trying to do "drone reconnaissance" in a more urban, suburban or commercial area is a problem with signal loss. Why not have a tiny add-on to the Mini Series that is a wireless repeater. With that "repeater drone" hovering high above the area of interest, it can maintain contact at a more downward angle to the "explorer drone" below it. This would also allow you to nearly double the "explorer drone" range when in an open field.

If you google I think you may find that there is a repeater but that it is supposedly only available in China.
That said would such a flight be legal in the USA but from a communication point of view and a VLOS point of view?
Does the Mini 3 Pro require RID?

I have built such a thing for a friend of mine who does a lot of commercial work.

  
  

It was a modified fixed wing glider, with electric propulsion, separate control / data radios and ground uplink antennas.  All built around COTS hardware and ArduPilot. As a repeater, it worked very well with an endurance of around 90 minutes.

  
  

It was not a cheap build and, even with the pre-programmed track and loiter / orbit capabilities built in to Mission Planner, it was still a handful to manage and required a thorough mission plan. If I were to do it again, I would go larger, have twin motors and add parachute recovery, since the thing got bent a couple of times, despite auto RTH.

  
  

Bottom line, I doubt you'd ever see a bird like this for hobby drones. The price would be high and the market size small. And, in the context of this suggested product, violations of Line of Sight regulations are highly likely.

I sent my drone (in FCC mode) over to a friend who lives about 100 meters away (as the crow flies) to drop off a memory card with adobe software on it for him, as soon as it landed it just lost signal, luckily i had set it to land on signal loss anyway. We then had a time and a half getting it to reconnect to come back, he ended up having to stick his arm out of his 3rd floor window facing me, i managed to fire it up but we kept losing signal before i could leave his hand, it took many minutes before i connected and we had to stay dead still and told him to throw it outwards (it was the MIni 2), i then quickly flew forward, then straight up and all was good after that.

With the antennas close to the ground, its going to lose signal fast, the radio signal goes out in waves, thats why the higher it is  the better the signal, being closer to the ground the signal becomes hit and miss.

WIth my old Phantom 4 Pro, i landed it about 60m away along side a field, it was in line of sight, nothing in the way, has soon as it landed it lost signal, i had to keep walking towards it till it reconnected.

DJI has but is yet to release to the world, a 3g module that can attached to various drones, if they ever do release it, it will be a game changer, but i have a bad feeling that many countries will not allow it, the UK and EU will probably be out of the running.

The newer drones are thinking more towards 4G SIMs in the drone, via a dongle. That way anything with 4G access can still fly around.

there simply isn't a decent market for that.  it's been thought of for many years for many different products that need better coverage.  the answer has always been a better single signal with my range and penetration.  and as mentioned, the only reasonable solution will be cellular and maybe one day, low orbit satellite.  only the military can benefit from such deployments because they have the money, the coordination, the manpower and the ability to bend the rules with national security objectives on their side.

and i hate to say it, there's nobody anywhere that i know of that can properly figure out how to design, market,  sell, and support this for the average consumer.

think about the  live deck by autel which is a brilliant piece of equipment but essentially a flop:  couldn't figure out the best use case to make it most desirable.

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