Dear Members,
I calibrate my compass one time before I fly anywhere.
I live in Florida and the weather conditions change everyday along with the atmospheric interference.
I do this as a habit.
My question is can calibrating so much cause any harm to the Phantom?
Best Regards,
William E. Burrows Jr.

Yup............

There are two schools of thought on compass calibration.

School 1 - calibrate your compass before every flight.
School 2 - calibrate your compass. Once it's calibrated, don't mess with it - with a couple of exceptions.

School 2 adherents feel that if it's been calibrated successfully that calibration will last for a long time. If you keep calibrating the compass, eventually you're going to get some bad data or a not-so-good calibration and therefore be begging for trouble. These are your basic (I'm not judging them!) "...if it ain't broke, don't fix it..." category of users/owners.

Now the exceptions.

If you're flying pretty much in the same area all the time, there is likely no need for constant calibration in the first place. I also live in Florida. I think, basically throughout the peninsular part of the state (excluding the panhandle), the compass deviation is approximately 5 degrees. That means there's a 5-degree difference between true north and magnetic north. Not super-significant.

Now if you go up into the panhandle (i.e., much further west), you might run into areas where the deviation will be different than it is, say in or near Orlando.

If you travel a good distance (hundreds or even thousands of miles) away from where you've been flying, a new compass calibration is probably a must.

It's also not a bad idea to do a new compass calibration (and an IMU calibration) right after effecting a firmware update/upgrade.

Does that help?

Art - N4PJ
Leesburg, FL

aburkefl@gmail. Posted at 2015-12-14 08:57
There are two schools of thought on compass calibration.

School 1 - calibrate your compass before e ...

IMO Art has nailed it.....calibrate after firmware upgrades and if you are at a new location a large distance from your normal flight location.

I think either way you will be fine, I usually only calibrate if I'm going far from home. Since I know I have a good calibration I won't want to re-calibrate each time in case I get a bad calibration if there's metal under the ground or something like that.

aburkefl@gmail. Posted at 2015-12-14 09:57
There are two schools of thought on compass calibration.

School 1 - calibrate your compass before e ...

+1  for school 2

4 phantoms, over a year
only calibrate when I travel or update.
last time was in July---still flying perfectly

good luck and have fun flying!

DJI -KEN but if u say u will get bad calibration as there is pipe below, wouldnt the app notify u that the calibration is bad ?

keongwee85 Posted at 2016-5-6 20:40
DJI -KEN but if u say u will get bad calibration as there is pipe below, wouldnt the app notify u th ...

Not necessarily.
There are reports every week of owners calibrating  their compass in a bad location (most commonly on reinforced concrete).
Sometimes it just works out that the calibration compensates for the distorted magnetic field and causes problems when they fly away from the calibration area and their compass now has difficulty because it's trying to compensate for a magnetic effect that's not there.

Here's a prime example of that:  

IC, thanks for the tips labroides, however i was wondering, say if i really got into the drifting, any tips of what should i be doing ???

That video definitely scary, think I'd be bringing her back home right away if I saw compass errors showing up or if orientation was even a bit off on the radar.

keongwee85 Posted at 2016-5-6 21:10
IC, thanks for the tips labroides, however i was wondering, say if i really got into the drifting, a ...

Just take it easy and bring it down and back slowly.
The compass error will make it tricky but shouldn't cause it to zoom off away from you.
The best idea is to look after your compass calibration and not give yourself a bad one.
Ironically most of the people that make this mistake, think they are ensuring a safe flight with the calibrate every time superstition.

labroides, would it better to change it to atti mode and bring it back manually ??? or even with atti mode the result will be the same ? thanks