DJI drones have a problem with hills: If your target location is more than 500 meters up a hill, you can't fly there. The 500 meter limitation is entirely artificial. It is there to stop bad pilots from flying their drones into the flight paths of aircraft. However the limitation makes no accomidation for ground level. If it was 500 meters above ground level and the app took into account local relative terrain elevations, all would be well. So this is fixable.

Where I live, there are a lot of hills and mountains that are more than 500 meters high so this limitation is the bane of my existance. I have to spend hours in Google Earth and other apps (including my own) trying to find locations I can launch from that are within both the horizontal range of the drone and the 500 meter elevation limitation. That leads to long unpleasant hikes with a big heavy backpack. Please DJI take this issue seriously. I hate the fact that my old Phantom 2+ can go more places than your latest Phantom 4 Pro.

Might need to land it somewhere along the way up to reset the homepoint so that when you takeoff again it calulates the elevation from your current ground level, instead of from the initial homepoint?  I dunno, just a thought.  Seems silly to have to do this, but it might work.

I haven't tried it but I have read that you can set the max altitude to "0" meters and it cancels the 500m max limit

yes, land, turn off motors, than take off again.. the limit is 500 over takeoff spot.... in the us would be the same with 400ft, but u could fly the path, where if it's above 500, u HAVE TO land and take off again, including motor kill.Remember, your new home position, unless u redefine it later in the app, will be where you did the intermediate landing...

Fort Collins here, Mr. Colorado. Where are you? I got p3Adv.
In general if u want to fly somewhere where u need to do 500 meters vertical.. approach it differently ;) You do not have much choice. I found landing gear extenders from Amazon do great allowing me to land a take off from more varied terrain, not extreme though....

AlecW Posted at 2017-1-19 14:34
Not far from you, Arvada.

I'm new, haven't take it much over 9,000 feet yet in the foothills.  500M is probably enough, I can think of a few places it won't but my hiking boots or jeep will help

Well, have fun with it, and be careful. Hope u have lot's of fun.

Jetpilot Posted at 2017-1-19 13:01
I haven't tried it but I have read that you can set the max altitude to "0" meters and it cancels the 500m max limit

What you've read is nonsense.

Ob1415 Posted at 2017-1-19 12:57
Might need to land it somewhere along the way up to reset the homepoint so that when you takeoff again it calulates the elevation from your current ground level, instead of from the initial homepoint?  I dunno, just a thought.  Seems silly to have to do this, but it might work.

And do you think you can land 500 metres up on the side of a hill and still have a clear line of sight to be able to restart?
There would be very few hills that would provide a suitable spot for that hypothetical scenario.

I had considered the idea of landing and taking off again but there is just no way to achieve line of sight on a flat surface from below on a steep hill even if you did find one. The drone may land but it will lose contact with the controller and then you have a long hike ahead of you possibly on private property. That sounds like fun. DJI should put that in their videos.

Jetpilot Posted at 2017-1-19 13:01
I haven't tried it but I have read that you can set the max altitude to "0" meters and it cancels the 500m max limit

Well

A long time ago , in a place far away it did.  But DJI closed that loophole very quickly and quite some time ago...