joeztan
lvl.4
Flight distance : 5660620 ft
Australia
Offline
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Hi gnixon2015,
I've bought a Vision+ unit plus a spare unit from April and August 2014. One is my primary flight unit, the other one sat in a box as redundancy. These units are the original version 2 unit, DJI now sell version 3.
Both units exhibit loss of several GPS satellites when recording video (both 1080p/30fps and 720p/60fps). This has been the biggest issue, and I've modify the units with additional shielding to help alleviate the problem.
My primary unit has had over 200 flights (totalling the cycle counts on all five batteries). Over this time, I've flown it in all sorts of reasonable environmental conditions and it has been quite reliable. I also take a great deal of care on my equipment and thoroughly check everything out before and after each flight session.
However, a month ago I almost lost my primary unit due to an unexplained behaviour which caused the Phantom to tilt severely to one side, loss of responsiveness to RC controls and lost altitude from 30m to the ground in a matter of seconds. This occured on a photographic job about 15mins into the flight. I had 35% battery life remaining and 9 GPS satellites locked, I was in GPS-ATTI mode while it was behaving uncontrollably in the air. I was away from any power lines, and obvious RF transmitters. Fortunately I was able to recover the unit and it still flies normally; which means the ESC, critical flight components and RC transmitter work. I have since sent that unit back to my reseller and waiting for news. my speculation on the root cause was the sensors feeding incorrect data to the flight controller, perhaps the GPS as it was Kp index was 3, hitting 4 over the 24 hour period.
One thing I would recommend is a GPS tracker, if it wasn't for this unit it would of made finding a downed aircraft much harder.
Trust me when I say that I didn't believe in flyaways until it actually happened to me. I'm a very cautious and take care of all of my equipment and always run through a check list and do compass calibration before flight in a new area. But once something like that happens to you, it really highlights the potential harm and financial loss that could result.
Since these devices have no engineered redundancy of critical flight systems or mitigations from system failure, I consider them borderline disposable equipment. Any form of critical flight hardware, major interference or software bug will caused major damage or complete loss of aircraft.
As a result, in my mind, any future purchases will be planned and budgeted accordingly. |
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