Another weird day at Baylands Park...

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Hey Everyone!

NOTE: Questions are in bold if you don't want to read everything.

So I just came back from Baylands Park in Sunnyvale. Overall, I had a great time.

The new Bestmaple Signal Booster I bought from Amazon worked really well. Whereas I would lose ALL connectivity (both video and RC) at about 1600 feet before, today I was able to hit 5,000 feet with all connectivity intact (video lagged at times, but TBE). At that point, I had to turn back because I would have had to fly over business buildings. Also, one of the dudes doing FPV drone racing came over and told me to avoid flying over the marshlands because it is a "preserve" and they have been warned by someone not to fly over them, or no-one would be allowed to fly at Baylands Park. Does anyone have any idea who has the right to tell us we cant fly over barren marshlands (no people, only a few scattered geese)? Anyways, I wont fly over there anymore because I don't want to ruin it for everyone, although I am curious as to why.

Also, I had my first crash. I was flying the quad towards me really fast. Unfortunately, I did not stop soon enough, and I clipped some small branches about 3 feet off the ground behind me (stupid mistake). This stopped two of the rotors momentarily. Then, when I picked up the drone, those two rotors started back up and hit my left leg, leaving a few small cuts. I need to be more careful! Anyways, everything worked perfectly for the 40+ mins of flying after the crash, except for one minor thing. When I ascended all the way to max altitude, and then dropped altitude, the DJI Go app warned me that I had reached the maximum altitude, even though I was GOING DOWN. It happened every single time I ascended to max altitude and then started descending. Has anyone else had this problem?

Thanks for all your help!

P.S. I'm flying a P3P with an Ipad Air 2.
 
Does anyone have any idea who has the right to tell us we cant fly over barren marshlands (no people, only a few scattered geese)? Anyways, I wont fly over there anymore because I don't want to ruin it for everyone, although I am curious as to why.

My take? It's probably not a regulation. There's probably nothing saying you can't do it. My guess is that someone that's been flying a lot longer than you knows the political landscape in that area and it was meant as a friendly word of advice. For every one of us, there are probably an equal number or way more of what I generally refer to as "do gooders" that would like nothing more than to see what we do stopped because some duck in the marsh got agitated. If you get involved in this sport along the lines of AMA type levels you'll see a lot of advice like this from enthusiasts. I don't really think it's meant to be any type of complaint to you, just a heads up.

Read through the forums here and look at how others frequently get called out posting videos where they pretty clearly violated FAA guidelines. While I don't believe that we should be the "drone police" the reality is that if we don't contain our own sport someone's going to contain it for us. Also, this sport also scares a lot of the tinfoil hat crowd that think we're spying on them - It really only takes one incident on the news to garner a lot of negative response across a lot of groups. We don't need that.
 
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so I flew at the sunnycale baylands recently, there were other flyers there and they were a friendly bunch...

city of sunnyvale has some updated signage covering the restricted area vs the rest of the park.

it's well marked, away from the parking lot /grassy area anyway.

upload_2017-5-6_16-39-35.png
 
I'm fuzzy on the flying over a wildlife refuge. I have seen where the FAA reccomend you stay 2,000 feet AGL, I have also seen it reported that it is ok to fly. Of course there are oodles of folks that would like you to only fly in approved parks, etc. So on an so forth...

I expect it is like National Parks where one can't take off or land in the park, but technically can fly over; not planning on testing that nor testing our local park service outlawing any remote control cars, planes, drones being used on or over land under their perview.
 

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