Does flying my P2V2+ use up my phone's internet quota ?

[jrieding]

Hi all,

I bought a P2V2+ quad last month and everything worked fine (beautiful pictures!) until yesterday. Since then I continue to see the following message when trying to connect the drone to my phone: "Internet not available". Having checked a number of possible problem sources & solutions I conclude that what I see is compatible with the assumption that in flying the drone I have used up my internet quota of 200 MB/month. However, this would mean that the WIFI connection between drone & Phone (Samsung Galaxy 3 mini running Andriod 4.2.2) also eats into my Internet quota.

Can anyone confirm this ? If yes, how much data traffic does this connection produce ?

Thanks,
Johannes

P.S. My Phone provider confirmed that exceeding the download quota causes internet access to be blocked unless you are connected to a router...

 

[jumanoc]

Your device only requires internet for downloading maps for Ground Station - Autonomous flight. I fly with my iPad mini (no Cell Plan) and have to pre-caché my location maps at home by WiFi before going to field.

EDITED: You have to connect just 1 time to internet for App registration with DJI website. Do it at home, no need to power phantom at all.

 

[DaveMoi]

The connection between your phone and the phantom is wifi and does not use your cellular quota. However if you use the map in the ground station that uses Internet data to draw the map. If you want to make sure you don't use cellular, just set your phone to airplane mode and activate only wifi to connect to your phantom....

 

[jrieding]

Thanks jumanoc & DaveMoi,

I have registered the App with DJI when I got the drone some time ago. I am not using the map (yet) and I am aware of the fact that I should "preload" it at home before going into the field. I will come back later today with a more detailed description of the sequence of (possibly entirely unrelated) events that occurred as the problem evolved.

Thanks for your interest,
Johannes

 

[bbfpv]

I can tell you with 100% certainty that the wifi connection to your bird is not using your phone's data plan.

 

[jrieding]

Here's the promised "detailed sequence of events" and possible problem causes I have been thinking about/investigated:

Two days ago I successfully flew the drone (session #7, a session being two flights as i have 2 accus, no problems encountered in previous sessions except for the occasional "connection lost" message from which it always recovered autonomously) until, 50% into the second accu, I lost FPV. Quite obviously the Range Extender had run out of battery as both lights were dead. I brought the drone down safely (visual flight rules) and recharged the Range Extender immediately when I got home. I don't think that this is in any way related to the problem I see now but thought perhaps I should mention it for completeness.

The weather remained good yesterday so I went out again, the first time with a rather detailed plan of what I wanted to do (waypoints, camera angles, altitude, drone orientation). On takeoff I noted that while I had a FPV picture on my phone I was missing the altitude/distance information on the display. I thought I would just do the first sequence of planned photo shots (single waypoint, single altitude, a few drone orientations & camera angles) before bringing it down again. To my surprise I got a message "SD card missing" (or so) when I wanted to take the first picture. Silently, I cursed myself for having forgotten to re-insert the card after I had downloaded the pictures from the day before, but on inspection after landing it turned out that the card was there and safely locked in its slot. I turned everything off and restarted powering up from scratch. When I turned on the DJI app on the Phone it said "Phantom connection broken". I could see the phantom on the list of WIFI devices but could not connect it: "Internet not available". After 15 minutes of retries without success and with cold fingers I gave up.

Today I decided to do a dry-test on the kitchen table. For a short period I could connect the Phone to the drone and saw a picture of the living room, then the Phone autonomously reconnected to my WLAN and lost the connection to the drone, leaving the message "Internet not available". I deleted my WLAN from the list of WIFI sources but that didn't help either. I re-inserted my WLAN into the WIFI list and again I got a brief glimpse of the living room before the connection to the Phantom was broken and the Phone reconnected to the WLAN. I went out of the house to revisit the exact place from which I had successfully flown a few days ago, I could see the Phantom on the WIFI list but could not connect because internet was not available. A few minutes ago I repeated the kitchen table experiment to make sure I had the story straight: This time I connected to the phantom for a brief instant, got the message "Please remove gimbal clamp" (which indeed I had forgotten to do), then the message disappeared and WIFI had disconnected autonomously from the Phantom.

All this led me to believe that somehow (i) my WLAN at home "overpowered" the WIFI connection to the drone (so moving away from my router and going out into the fields would solve the problem) but that (ii) my provider blocked access to the internet when not close to my router because I had used up my quota.

Does this make sense to you ? I'm almost certain it has something to do with my Phone settings... Perhaps I should do the kitchen table test with the Phone set to airline mode as suggested by DaveMoi?

Thanks for reading this to the end...
Johannes

 

[bbfpv]

You aren't using a data plan when you are on Wifi, so it has nothing to do with your carrier.

1) Read this: http://www.phantompilots.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4055

2) Then forget all networks and connect to the phantom wifi again. It's entirely possible that the phantom is having a hard time competing with the other networks in/near your house, and if your phone is set to pick the strongest connection, it'll drop the phantom connection and pick your house wifi or whatever open network has a better signal.

3) If that doesn't help, rebind your phone and extender *after* forgetting all other networks.
4) If that doesn't work, do you have a data limit cap set in Android? If so, make sure it's not including wifi data.
5) If that doesn't work, try surfing the web on your phone using your home network. If you get the same message, see #4
6) If that doesn't work, try a different device.

 

[jrieding]

Thanks bbftv,

I need to verify this in the field tomorrow but in the kitchen table dry-run a combination of your suggestions appears to have done the trick: I unchecked the data limit box altogether (your point 4) and forgot all networks except the P2 connection. I now can see my living room and operate the gimbal. Looking good for tomorrow's field trial... Be sure I'll be back if it doesn't work

Thanks,
Johannes

 

[Meta4]

The Phantom works just fine with a dumb tablet or phone with no sim card and can get by just fine with no internet connection.
All it needs is wifi.

Wherever your data went, it had nothing to do with the Phantom.

 

[happydays]

Are you sure the wifi extender is working? I had a problem with my RE700 that wouldn't charge (that was in August - I'm still waiting on a replacement from quadcopters). If it isn't charging (and therefore working) the phantom won't be able to connect to it. Update us with the light situation on the extender?

 

[max]

This definitely has to do with settings in your phone. When I connect to the phantom I get a warning message from my phone OS saying internet is not available. This is obvious and just means the world wide web is not available through the WiFi connection. However on my phone I can simple click ignore or "stop trying to connect to the internet on this WiFi connection" or something along those lines. I remain connected to the phantom WiFi. There may be some setting in your phone related to preferred WiFi connection order, but you already tried deleting your home WiFi and it also did it in the field. good luck

 

[jrieding]

Thanks to all: Confirmed in the field today that it was a data quota issue on my Phone, combined with my WLAN overpowering the WIFI connection when I tried to analyse the problem in kitchen table experiments at home.

Thanks to all who showed interest in the problem and to bbftv, whose suggestions set me on the right track to solving the issue.

Case closed.
Johannes

 

[jrieding]

To happydays (& others) on the issue of the range extender: I am not really happy with this part, even at close range it rather often drops connection. But it was not the cause of the problem...