Intermittent TX signal loss

[Vanislandflyer]

Howdy everybody.
I recently purchased a new P3S and am having a great time with it. I've flown quads and hex's and octo's in the past and to be honest, I really like DJI'S engineering and the flight characteristics are pretty impressive for the price point. But I'd like to ask a few questions to the long term phantom pilots.
I let my son (11) take it for a flight a few days ago. He has a low end quad and a quad millennium falcon (wish DJI would make one with the phantom or inspire platform, but that's another post..) So he has indoor experience flying and I wasn't worried about anything as I was right beside him.. well, he put it into a tree. A preventable accident if he did the mental preflight check I've been teaching him.. anyway, it clipped a tree and fell about 6' onto its back.. there was no visible damage, but I changed out the props just to be sure that didn't have a weak point.
I only got it the day before, so I don't have a decent comparison of how it was before the tree interface and after. But this is what's concerning me.
1. I rarely go farther than a few hundred meters away and rarely over 100m altitude, but at those distances I get the red "transmitter signal weak" warning flashing on and off on the screen. It doesn't stay on, it comes on every 5 seconds or so, but only for a second and then it's green again for another 5 seconds or so. If I ignore the warning and keep flying away it obeys my TX fine and I have yet to have a RTH triggered by the weak signal. I have never flown it farther than maybe 350 or 400m away and never more than 120m high, so by DJI'S standards I'm barely even scratching the surface of its real control radius. And I've never had a real loss of signal. Does anybody else have this happen to them?

2. Another annoyance rather than a problem (yet), seemingly at random intervals the apps voice comes on telling me I'm in "ATTI mode", but when I look at the screen I'm green and have plenty of satellites locked. Has yet to actually lose GPS on me. But it'll put a bit of a scare into me because I use it mostly for photography purposes and sometimes I'm flying in a decent breeze to get the appropriate wind effects on my subject. Such as a sailboat under way, or wind ripples in a farmers field.. and if I lost GPS it could be a bit hairy getting it back to me..
Does anybody else have this issue?

3. Is it possible that the tree interface has created these issues? I'd like to reiterate that the phantom is performing like a champ and is showing absolutely no sign of real technical issues. It's just unnerving that I keep getting warnings thrown at me.
Thanks for reading my novel and extra thanks to anybody that has anything to add or suggest.
Cheers.
Wyatt.

 

[dguth66]

Hey there ... Nice to hear your having fun !
Google antenna mods and you will find what your looking for as in increasing the usable range with simple ( well not that bad ) swap of your RC antenna.

As for the ATTI coming in sometimes ... Maybe the soft crash left the internal GPS antenna connector loose to the main board ?

 

[Vanislandflyer]

Hey there ... Nice to hear your having fun !
Google antenna mods and you will find what your looking for as in increasing the usable range with simple ( well not that bad ) swap of your RC antenna.

As for the ATTI coming in sometimes ... Maybe the soft crash left the internal GPS antenna connector loose to the main board ?

Ohh I've looked into antenna mods, but I'm not going to invest in this bird too heavily. I've got one of those copper parabolic range extenders that clip onto the antenna on the way from Amazon. But I'm going to get a P4 before too long, and this one will probably either be a hand me down to my son or I'll sell it to invest in the P4 a little more heavily (TX mods, and a crapload of batteries).
But as for when it says I'm in atti, only once or twice (once this evening) did it actually go into atti. Usually it doesn't switch at all, it just says it did.
Tonight was interesting, just an hour ago I was out for a night flight and everything was fine. Calibrated the compass before flight, had GPS lock and home point set. Flew up and away and when I was about 250m away and about 110m high it DID go into ATTI. I'm pretty sure it was my bad, as I Calibrated the compass about 10' from a chain link fence. So I was probably a little too close to the steel fence when I did it.
But here I am. 11pm in a pretty stiff wind and she starts flying away on me. It was pretty hard to see the front lights at this point because they're all red now. So I zig zagged a bit until I got my bearings, then flew back towards me. The red warning on the screen blinking "compass error". The wind really put my pilot skills to the test as my takeoff and landing area was not exactly big and had a fence on one side and trees on the other. Plus the wind was gusting all over the place.. She flew like she was drunk. I wrestled with her to about 4' and was about to land, when suddenly everything went green. Full GPS lock with 12 sats. So without landing I went right back up and flew around at long distance and high altitude for the next 17 mins without incident. No warnings, no ATTI, she flew like a champ.
Anybody experience this before?

 

[Vanislandflyer]

Sorry if these are rookie Phantom questions. It's my first DJI. Everything else I've flown was modular stuff.

 

[dguth66]

Hey no problem we are here to help, since my UAV is quite different that yours wrt hardware I'll let another P3S user answer your question.

But... a word of friendly advise, if ever u have issues flying it's not a good idea to keep flying especially "long distance and high altitude" because the chances of a crash / loss of control are a LOT greater. Until at least you stop all operations and check things out. Remember you are the pilot and thus you are responsible for what happens as the pilot ... what if there were another in-flight issue and your P3S dropped out of the sky and hit someone or something ?

 

[Vanislandflyer]

Hey no problem we are here to help, since my UAV is quite different that yours wrt hardware I'll let another P3S user answer your question.

But... a word of friendly advise, if ever u have issues flying it's not a good idea to keep flying especially "long distance and high altitude" because the chances of a crash / loss of control are a LOT greater. Until at least you stop all operations and check things out. Remember you are the pilot and thus you are responsible for what happens as the pilot ... what if there were another in-flight issue and your P3S dropped out of the sky and hit someone or something ?

Yeah.. thanks for assuming I'm some idiot that flies over people and property with no understanding of basic aircraft safety..
Not sure if you read my post at all, but I've never lost control of my aircraft, it functions perfectly fine and the only systems that are (maybe) malfunctioning are not needed for VLOS flight (Remember, I've never flown farther than 400m away). If I really did lose GPS or Compass like I did last night, I fly her manually. It's not going to drop out of the sky, except in the extremely unlikely event that it suffers a primary FS failure.

 

[Vanislandflyer]

Yeah.. thanks for assuming I'm some idiot that flies over people and property with no understanding of basic aircraft safety..
Not sure if you read my post at all, but I've never lost control of my aircraft, it functions perfectly fine and the only systems that are (maybe) malfunctioning are not needed for VLOS flight (Remember, I've never flown farther than 400m away). If I really did lose GPS or Compass like I did last night, I fly her manually. It's not going to drop out of the sky, except in the extremely unlikely event that it suffers a primary FS failure.

NOTE: my definition of high altitude and long distance is probably different from yours. To me, 400m away is far enough and 120m alt is high enough for a P3s.