Hi All

I thought I would post a quick heads up for the Phantom community. As background I have been flying RC Helis and various aircraft for 20+ years and fiddling with the associated electronics (as you do!).

I recently bought two vision 2+ V3 Phantoms. The first flew away and was recovered a few days later and the second began playing up so was grounded ASAP. I opened both up and found the same issues - and reason for the first flyaway.

In short:

If you remove the battery and look into the shell, on the back left and right you will notice two angled PCB boards. Look at the one on the left - it has a single white cable coming from it. Also wedged across the top of the board is a shielded set of cables for the leads to the front blackberry type adaptor. On both mine the white cable was sandwiched between the black shielded cable and the PCB which acts as a sharp file - the vibration cut the white lead on the fly away and seriously abraded the second units cable. I am sure these cables are meant to be routed over the top of the black shielded cable to avoid this but in both my examples they were not.

Having noted this I thought I would have a careful look at the rest of the intenal wiring/routing. The antennas from the Rx are free to rub on the larger PCBs where they exit (dab of silicon would solve this before they also sever) and the antennas wires are tie wrapped to the esc power supply cables - in my experience this is bad practice and will reduce your actual range/introduce power spikes for the rx to deal with. I would suggest carefully snipping the tie wraps and rerouting the antennas. Please remember to secure the leads for all again but in a way that they are as far from sharp PCB edges and powerful current flows if you can and have a degree of fles to prevent them being pulled from thier respective pugs on the boards.

Final point - small one - with most 2.4/5 GHz antennas I have always been lead to belive they should be at 90degrees to one and other - in the phantom they are both pointing down in the legs. I devised a way to get one at 90 degrees protruding from the side of the landing leg.

In short the above has given a large range increase and to date removed the frequent warning that connection has broken issues.

All the above is just my personal comment/experience but please consider this as it could save a serious accident to people/property and also your quad!

Happy flying

Nick T

Thank you, nicktaylor7274, for sharing this with us. It is all the little things that do matter.

momochi Posted at 2015-2-9 18:26
Thank you, nicktaylor7274, for sharing this with us. It is all the little things that do matter.

Hi guys

No pics on the second one as thats back together with mods made - however the first one that flew off and was kindly returned by a lovely old lady who walking her dog and 'got lost' and stumbled on it (put missing pics up) is still in the process of going back into its new shell so should be easy to slightly disassemble to show the areas.

BTW how would I upload pics to this forum. Took me a while to suss the verify code below;)

Regards

Nick T

momochi Posted at 2015-2-9 18:26
Thank you, nicktaylor7274, for sharing this with us. It is all the little things that do matter.

Hi guys

No pics on the second one as thats back together with mods made - however the first one that flew off and was kindly returned by a lovely old lady who walking her dog and 'got lost' and stumbled on it (put missing pics up) is still in the process of going back into its new shell so should be easy to slightly disassemble to show the areas.

BTW how would I upload pics to this forum. Took me a while to suss the verify code below;)

Regards

Nick T

BTW don't bend the last inch and a half of the antennas in the legs!!!! thats the actual antenna - just the softer wire that goes into the heat shrink. Know its obvious to most but in pointing out a 'relatively easy safety fix would not want to cause mayhem/increased danger to people as unless you know about that last bit of the antenna (after all almost anyone can fly these - not just RC enthusiasts) I could end up causing more harm than good.

If in any doubt about your abilities please don't fiddle