Is Litchi "orbit" dangerous?

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Continuing to try and educate myself:

Reading Litchi Orbit use, Litchi says that upon RC/AC signal loss, the craft will continue to orbit until battery forces auto-land, EVEN if RTH is programmed.

Yikes! I see in an open area with limited radius set, this might not be a problem.

But in a larger radius, rough/wooded terrain... ouch for auto-land!

Would it not be better to abandon
Orbit altogether, and program a circular waypoint mission instead?

Then you could have RTH on signal loss.

Thoughts?
 
Normally you most likely will only fly an orbit for a short period of time, and generally speaking it will most likely be well within VLOS and even much closer in reality. It is smoother than a circular "waypoint" in general. That is really what "orbit" is for. Just a smooth circular path around a POI, that is well within your VLOS.
 
Thanks... That does make sense.

I was wanting to orbit/video my house/land. House is in the middle of three heavily wooded acres. I have a slight tree canopy opening over my rear deck, which I've launched/landed through several times without issue.

But once orbiting, it would be beyond LOS because of the height of the trees.

I've flown my neighborhood BLOS because it's a heavily wooded area, distance never more than 3500 feet or so.

I've never had signal issues here (knock on wood), so I'm just being cautious.
 
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regularly fly (waypoints) to location of orbit which is quite a distance from home point. Signal is good one side of the orbit so I start and stop there usually, and also focus the camera, then start a WP mission back home. Today it wouldn't exit the orbit with ok signal - ie stop button did not work and I almost had a heart attack. Could focus camera ok so there was definitely signal at some point along the orbit. No other modes like waypoint would load as it said "mission in progress error", as did FPV - it would not exit orbiting so I couldn't manually fly out. long story short the only thing that worked is a hard press (on the controller) of RTH. In future I reckon its a lot safer to mimic the orbit with curved WP.
 
thanks. I did one - 2 orbits - they need to be at constant altitude and radius. Can't be perfect as the gimbal changes a bit but it looks ok. Will see when I fly soon if the video is good. converting speed of rotation as degrees/s to m/s of waypoints requires a bit of math, but the beauty of litchi is you can tweak it until its ok. doing a rotating video timelapse of construction. Just done with the orbit function after today!

It circles twice so waypoints are over each other. If you double your radius, make that the square side length, maximize curve size to your radius, you just have to put the waypoints in a perfect square around the POI. Then interpolate the gimbal. Entry and exit from the orbit to areas of good signal. Let you know how it goes.
 
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