Completely lost the communication for 78 seconds

[apprentice]

Was flying my drone yesterday morning. It was in the mountains.

Not sure what happened but after 12 minutes of flying I completely lost the communication for 178 seconds and was unable to reestablish it until when the drone started landing. That never happened to me before.

I had a complete visual contact with the drone with no mountain in between. There were no radio transmitters in the area even mobile phone didn't work. The drone was 0.6 miles away from me but on previous flight I flew nearly twice as long with no problems.

The home point elevation was over 5900 feet. It was cold at around 36F (2C) and very windy at times.

To reestablish the connection I tried restarting the remote controller and the DJI GO app on my iPad. Nothing changed. But when the drone returned and was above my head I tried with switching to A-TTI mode and this really helped. I got the communication again so that I was able to land manually.

Anyone else had such an experience?

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[Meta4]

Not sure what happened but after 12 minutes of flying I completely lost the communication for 178 seconds and I was unable to reestablish it until when the drone started landing

If your Phantom had lost signal completely, after 3 seconds it should have initiated RTH.
HealthyDrones shows that it did not lose signal completely - that it only lost the downlink (signal from Phantom to the controller.
HD's explanation says it all:

Downlink data connection lost ( Data Loss ) means that the remote got partial or no flight data from the aircraft for more than 1 second, which means the data downlink had issues.
It is possible that during this time there is a sense of full control of the aircraft via the remote as well as clear video, however typically the video gets choppy and the remote controls may have some delay.​

Usually you can tell if you still have control signal by the green/red LED on the controller.
It's hard to say why you could not re-establish control but as a last resort, switching the controller off probably would have initiated RTH.

 

[apprentice]

If your Phantom had lost signal completely, after 3 seconds it should have initiated RTH.
HealthyDrones shows that it did not lose signal completely - that it only lost the downlink (signal from Phantom to the controller.
HD's explanation says it all:

Downlink data connection lost ( Data Loss ) means that the remote got partial or no flight data from the aircraft for more than 1 second, which means the data downlink had issues.
It is possible that during this time there is a sense of full control of the aircraft via the remote as well as clear video, however typically the video gets choppy and the remote controls may have some delay.​

Usually you can tell if you still have control signal by the green/red LED on the controller.
It's hard to say why you could not re-establish control but as a last resort, switching the controller off probably would have initiated RTH.

Thank you for your reply.

I was worried because I noticed there are two types of disconnection. One is video link disconnection but in my case it said Aircraft disconnected.

I wouldn't worry about being disconnected anyway because it happens to me all the time. But I was worried that I was unable to establish the connection even when the drone was exactly above my head.