Another food for thought from my experience, I bought a basic combo. Then I bought 1 extry battery pack and the remote control. I always had issues in the first connect, details as below:1. With the new battery, even when I was outside, the GPS was >10, my screen kept jumping between atti mode and gps mode. I then made the auto take-off, the connection lost occasionally. I then sensed it might goes wrong. I therefore, landed it, plugged into my pc and refresh (re-run the firmware) with that new battery. Everything is normal after that until now, no occational connection lost or jumping to atti mode.
2. With the new remote control, issues happen again in first connection, the aircraft drifted, compass error (While just feel minutes before no issue when I used the phone), I therefore landed the aircraft, recalibrated remote control, recalibrated aircraft IMU and compass. Relaunched and everything went smoothly, until now.

Therefore, with my experience, I think Spark is quite sensitive to new hardware, and would need to re-calibrate when being connected to new hardware.
And as the veterans on the forum advised: Do not fly recklessly, spending few minutes to run through "pre-flight checklist", and monitor its behavior before fly high, when you sense something not normal, reset everything, recalibrate everything, I believe it will save you from headache. At least for me.

However, there are still cases of power-off during mid-flight that concern me, DJI seems to not knowing the reason as well,...

should i wait to buy the spark? now im scared lol i was looking to buy this drone right now. it is hardware or software, the karma was hardware related.

Efrommel13 Posted at 2017-7-16 21:50
should i wait to buy the spark? now im scared lol i was looking to buy this drone right now. it is hardware or software, the karma was hardware related.

Hardware is fine, my point was that whenever connect to the new hardware, I found that I need to do the re-calibrate, just only for me though, so don't let this discourage me. If you ask me do I like Spark: yes, very much. But not yet have 100% confident in flying far.
Just so you know my longest distance is 500m, and highest altitude is 120m. Never had confident to fly more than that range.
Anyway, besides that, gesture mode, quickshots, everything works perfectly for me.
Also, even though I don't really like the way that DJI released the product, then, fix issues based on customer reports. But seeing there are also many issues with Phantoms and Mavic from their first days. I guess this is DJI style.

Phuong Do Posted at 2017-7-16 21:58
Hardware is fine, my point was that whenever connect to the new hardware, I found that I need to do the re-calibrate, just only for me though, so don't let this discourage me. If you ask me do I like Spark: yes, very much. But not yet have 100% confident in flying far.
Just so you know my longest distance is 500m, and highest altitude is 120m. Never had confident to fly more than that range.
Anyway, besides that, gesture mode, quickshots, everything works perfectly for me.

Um ... you do not trust over 120mt and 500mt? But if it falls from that height one does not even save a stone

I bought the fly more package and one extra battery. I calibrate the compass at each new location. So far no issues. Indoor locations don’t reliably get a gps signal, but that is to be expected.