OK so I am trying to shoot some continuous video of coastal shoreline. Here is my problem I want one continuous shot at a continuous speed not spliced together footage some fast and some slower. We cannot ride or drive anything on the beach here so a chase vehicle is out and I am not skilled or skinny enough to keep up with my P2V+ running down the beach so my footage ends up up starting stopping when I lose FPV (for some reason down at the beach my FPV range SUCKS) I could hit my phantom with a rock when my FPV cuts out. Only thing I can think of is all the wifi from the condos kills the range. I dont want different clips with various travel speeds just one smooth clip from start to finish. The only thing I have going for me is it is a straight shot no curves or power lines or other obstacles in my way. This is what I have come up with power up my P2V+ at one end of the beach and establish a home point there. Jump back in the car and go to the other end of the beach launch the phantom from this location once it is at the height I want (I know the min would be around 60 feet) which would be fine for what I want then switch off the controller so it goes into fail safe mode and heads back to the home point. then jump back in the car and race back to the home point. I may recruit the wife as a home point monitor so incase it beats me back no one makes off with my phantom. The distance I am trying to cover is 3.21 miles. Is this too far on a single charge? considering I would have to leave the phantom on during transport from home point to starting point? Is there anything I can do to increase safe travel distance such as disabling the leds on the bottom even just the red ones in the front seems like it would help. If I have to I would split the total distance in half, I can deal with that just not every couple hundred meters I get now if i'm lucky. Or is there a better way to accomplish this??
First off, you mentioned you only get a couple of hundred meters, is that before you lose connection? What way is your antenna pointed? Is it pointed straight at the Phantom or 90 degrees to the Phantom?
The RC range is ok but the FPV really suffers down at the beach I can still easily see the phantom in the sky after my FPV cuts out. However I get a little nervous flying it BVR without FPV. Plus i know there is no way to get 2-3 miles of FPV range without a major investment. Before I purchased it I figured I would use the gps app not realizing there was a radius limitation set on the app. Basically I need a safe, economical and consistent way to fly from point A to point B
You could do it with the bluetooth adapter and the ipad groundstation app. You can set a route for it to follow and it should follow that path on it's own. Check out.
Yes I was thinking about that but i went on the dji sight and it looked like I needed to buy some additional hardware as well around 350 plus I would also need to buy a IPOD I do have a surface pro 2, Samsung tab and soon a note pro 4 12.2 or whatever it is called but no ipod. So I ruled that option out financially. If I am mistaken and dont need the data link hardware please let me know. If it is just a app I could get a ipod for a day. Is my method crazy? It seems reasonably safe to me it is a private stretch of beach not public so will not be flying over tons of people. Just concerned about it making it all the way home and what happens if it runs out of juice before reaching the home point?
3.21 miles is definitely too far for a return trip, but a one way trip may work... Use the hacked app which has the distance limits removed to program a Ground station mission along the beach. Start the mission and get in your car and drive to the other end of the beach. When the Phantom gets there, take control and land it manually. Or, split the distance and use the hacked app to do 2-3 GS missions with a return trip each time. Situations like this are exactly why DJI needs to remove the stupid 1500' limit in the GS app. Also, the stand alone Ground Station is only officially supported on the P2 not the P2V/V+. You may be able to make it work anyhow, but there could be problems especially with interference between it's 2.45Ghz link and the WiFi on the V/V+.