tizzl10 said:
I disagree.. when you say "so it doesn't lose its binding" to me, that means losing the complete ability to communicate the transmitter with the aircraft unless you go through the rebinding process.. this is simply not true. Furthermore, the controller does not have any knowledge of your home location.. all of that data is stored on the aircraft at the time home location is set. Fact is, I find absolutely nothing is wrong with turning off the transmitter in order to initiate RTH. I do it all of the time on my distance flights and it has yet to fail me.
I think there are two things going on, here.
The first is a misunderstanding of what "binding" is. Binding is NOT just the connection. It's how that connection is bound together between the components of the system.
When you turn on your RC, and then turn on your Phantom, there's a handshake that occurs. The Phantom passes info about itself to the controller, which the controller stores as the "target", and the Phantom in turn stores info about the controller so it knows who's talking to it. That is "binding". And that binding is kept (stored) for as long as the controller and Phantom are powered on.
When you
power off the controller, it not only breaks the connection, but also forgets the binding. So that when you power it back on, the RC and the Phantom have to go through the entire handshaking process again to re-initiate the binding. Sometimes this is successful, sometimes it is not.
But the second thing is a misunderstanding (or, rather, an assumption) of what's happening when you use S1 to switch over to RTH.
When S1 is thrown, the controller is actually sending a command to the Phantom to initiate RTH. My belief is that the "Lost connection" error you're seeing in the app is actually a red herring... errantly popping up because the app has detected that the Phantom is executing a RTH. But even if it wasn't... even if S1 breaks the connection (and there's no reason to believe that it does... it's not like S1 is tied into the power bus of the controller)... both the controller and the Phantom still remember the binding (since neither lost power). The Phantom continues looking for signals from that bound controller. When you flip S1 back to normal flight, the full handshake does not have to reoccur because both the controller and the Phantom have remembered who they're communicating with. And when each receives data from the appropriate counterpart, they go right on communicating as if nothing has happened.
That's the difference.