cameracollector
Second Officer
Flight distance : 807133 ft
Canada
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After a few dozen or so flights, for the first time I had an issue that really gave me a scare. I was flying over a farm field the other day, getting some low proximity shots, in an area I have flown in before with no issues. I flew about 600 meters out about 4' - 5' above ground level, stopped, did a 45 degree turn and another 600 or so meters out. At the time I was about 800 meters from home point. I was stopped and was just hovering when the GO app started warning about bad signal, I was behind a thin row of trees so I walked out to where I'd be LOS and also gave it some throttle to gain altitude because I wanted to get a few high still shots anyway.
Well, then the GO app just lost connection altogether, screen faded and it would not reconnect no matter what. I was in plain LOS by then but I could not see the P4 as it was too far away. I knew it was in the clear so I shut down the app and restarted it a couple of times, but it would not reconnect. Starting to sweat a bit I hit the RTH button a couple of times, and started to prepare myself for a long walk as I could not hear it returning. Well, after a (very long) minute or two I finally heard it and it was coming back. The app was still greyed out and disconnected, and the P4 just kept going past the home point so I tried the sticks and was able to stop it. if I let go of the sticks it wanted to keep going past me, but I could still control it so I brought it down. I had to be quite agressive with the sticks to bring it down too, it seemed to be flying quite erratically. I believe at the time the app was also displaying an interference warning of some sort too, but I was concentrating on just getting it on the ground to notice exactly what it said.
I powered it down, cycled the power on my S2 tablet, started the app again and powered up the P4 - everything was back to normal. Did a couple of short flights to use up the rest of the battery with no other incidents.
Never had this happen before - I've had the app crash a time or two in mid flight, but usually just stop and hover, restart the app and it reconnects. As an aside, since I put the tablet in airplane mode I've also not had the app crash again.
Now I'm scared to fly to far away after that, but I'm wondering if there was radio interference in that particular area. There are some oil pump jacks and well sites in the area and I'm wondering if one of them was transmitting on the same frequency or something.
I was hoping the camera kept recording, but I stopped recording just as I hit the area where it lost contact - also when the bird came back the camera/gimbal was hanging at an angle like it wasn't even powered on, which I thought was a little strange.
Would there be any logs that would show what might have happened? I'm real curious as to what may have caused this.
My app is at 4.0.5 and the RC is 1.8.0. Not sure what the P4 firmware is but probably the last one before the update everyone is complaining about having to log in all the time.
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