aw.847.aw
lvl.1
Flight distance : 17848 ft
Offline
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Hey all!
Here mostly to vent my frustrations and see what support /advice / help I can actually get from anyone including DJI. Thus far my experience with DJI has been very poor to say the least. Anyways, I picked up a Spark 2 weeks ago. After spending hours on the impossible known buggy android update that apparently can brick your controller, I managed to get the unit and everything flying and functioning....
11th flight in on this particular unit, I went to go take some quick shots for a client but figured I'd do a warm up flight first. Set home point (yes actually heard the lady say home point set and saw confirmation on screen), and took off. I got 500m distance away at only a few meters height down the driveway... lost signal hard and the screen went black and white. Attempted to get return to home to kick in for a few agonizing minutes or at least get the thing started in the right direction home as I had a feeling it was going down due to glitching and not indicating returning to home ran out to find the thing and long story short the thing is gone somewhere in a swamp or sourrounding farm field either it landed itself or just came down hard. I used the find my drone function and as expected had zero luck finding my unit in or around the area where the last gps call out came from.
I've read that the spark gps modules are weak compared to the most of the other DJI units and the fact that my unit didn't make it back to the homepoint or seemingly try to make it home is extremely concerning and makes me wonder if I ended up with a lemon unit or the Sparks hardware itself is inherently flawed. I've started a warranty claim after an excruciating hour and a half on the phone and 2 dropped calls while on hold but I'm not holding my breath due to some of the horror stories I've heard. Do you guys think I should hold out for a warranty replacement, try my luck with purchasing another new unit, or just buckle down and go for the mavic pro and pray and hope this doesn't happen again?
The real kicker was, some local police actually came by and stopped to ask why I was suspiciously on the side of this random country road rooting around in other peoples ditches and fields, I told them I dropped my phone while on a walk as to not arouse suspicion and get landed with a few unsafe UAV operator BS citations/trespass tickets. I've had zero issues in the past with any of my phantoms, and quite literally this is pretty close to the worst case scenario that could happen here, a return to home fly away with an unknown destination. Despite all this, I feel I'm extremely fortunate that the craft gave up during a rural flight amongst 100 acre farm properties and not in the busy neighbourhood with houses all crammed together where I was flying in last night.
*closing note - this being one of my most unforseen, sktechy, and potentially devastating rc incidents in my 25 years of RC, has opened my my eyes to these crafts even with multiple previous years of other multirotor and dji projucts. These sort of instances really beg the question, why arent there failsafes in place for these crafts if the soft failsafes won't kick in properly? It'd be much better to essentially knock the units out of the sky in place in a controlled fashion as opposed have to run the risk of having them wander off for good if their RTH function ins't working, in this apparent return to home flyaway situation (or whatever you want to call it)?
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