Lost drone :-(

If my bird had those kinds of interference problems and decided to come home I would not have cancelled the RTH

I will also do that in future, another lesson from this experience

Flying over water one takes their chances

Yep, I'll think twice about that in future.

This pilot can obviously afford boo boos.

The first two comments had some value, this one was unnecessary. A loss is a loss no matter who it happens too. And no I can't afford boos boos but I'm trying to learn from them.
 
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If it was unable to find the home point, that would indicate a loss of GPS wouldn't it?
Yes. Perhaps the GPS was not working properly too due to the strong interference issues.

FYI, in the "Advanced Settings" section of the DJI GO app, there is a setting named "RC Signal Lost". By default, it's set to "Return-to-Home". If you set that to "Hover", your Phantom will hover at its current location if it loses the RC signal. However, if the signal is not reestablished before the battery reaches the critical low level, your Phantom will still auto land at its current location.
 
4' that sucks, big flash light at night. Two boats one with the light the other spotter. Will a laser shine threw water? Need something to drag the bottom like a rake or two.
 
I agree, but there is warning for high wind.

This is message to all about wind.

I had no idea my flight on a nice Sunday near my house 200' up ended up very windy across the valley. I had battery warning hit RTH and never made it back. Watching it auto land when then it just dropped. Took an hour to find it, and is headed to California VIA ground.

Didn't know until I viewed the flight on
HealthyDrones.com - Innovative flight data analysis that matters.

Then on Monday I read this post from Dirk.

I let it rip today. (Stock) 4031ft

From now on I am going to hover at the beginning and 5 mins out. Switch to ATTI and watch my speed for 5 secs.

This should be part of flight check list.


I can't see in my Healthy Drones log where is says there was 26 mph winds. Can someone point me at that please? I see it says gusts of up to 20.7 mph which I understand it also too high but when I took off and where I took off from the wind was not that high. Dirk's advice is spot on, thanks.
 
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Unfortunately I couldn't find it. 4 feet of water in that spot and is is dark brown, low visibility so I couldn't see it. Tried netting for it but it is the proverbial needle in a haystack. It was a long shot but I tried.
I hope I never had to boat to get mine. But I'm astonished what drone pilots will do to get their baby back. :)


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Yes. Perhaps the GPS was not working properly too due to the strong interference issues.

FYI, in the "Advanced Settings" section of the DJI GO app, there is a setting named "RC Signal Lost". By default, it's set to "Return-to-Home". If you set that to "Hover", your Phantom will hover at its current location if it loses the RC signal. However, if the signal is not reestablished before the battery reaches the critical low level, your Phantom will still auto land at its current location.

I can see that hovering is better than auto landing but my RC Signal Lost was set to RTH which it didn't do, it just Auto Landed. So if it did that because of loss of GPS, is that when fail safe should kick in?
 
Your correct that's what I also see, I hadn't look at the HD since yesterday.
 
I hope I never had to boat to get mine. But I'm astonished what drone pilots will do to get their baby back. :)


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I was resigned to that fact that most likely the drone was already dead or looking at a costly repair. My motivation was to help understand why it happened. If I had found it and it helped me and others not go through a loss again, it's would have been a win. Anyway it was a nice couple of hours in the sun on the lake, gotta love Florida eh?
 
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I seem to remember a similar post maybe a month ago. That pilot also had canceled RTH previously during the flight. Could that have some effect on a subsequent failsafe such as auto-land instead of RTH?
I suspect the auto land was caused by low battery/
 
but my RC Signal Lost was set to RTH which it didn't do, it just Auto Landed
One of two things most likely happened when you lost the RC connection:

1) RTH failsafe kicked in, there was not a good GPS connection (or some kind of compass interference), and your Phantom auto landed at its current location because it could not locate the home point.

2) RTH failsafe kicked in, your Phantom started coming home, the battery reached the critical low battery level, and your Phantom landed at its current location.

It would be impossible to know what happened without seeing the internal log from your Phantom.

Note: The Phantom manual states that the RTH failsafe will only work if the "home point was successfully recorded and the compass is functioning normally". Also, the "aircraft cannot return to the home point when [the] GPS signal is weak or unavailable".
 
The GPS map shows sufficient GPS signal at the end of the flight.. hard to imagine that DJI would design RTH to auto land when drone cant find GPS signal or home point right away.. makes more sense to program it to hover until battery is critically low and then, if still no signal, auto land..
something triggered it to land at 13 mins:
a 13m 12s 326.4 ft 3,758 ft Mode Mode changed to AutoLanding
How can the battery get to critical low level at only 13min if it started full?
Maybe it has got something to do with the settings in the app?
I noticed after my last DJIGo app auto-update some of my settings got reset, like smart RTH was turned off.
 
Hmm....I see the home point set in the .txt and gps is available for the whole flight...see google earth picture below...I do not see any RTH states and the data seems to just stop...looks shorter than HD. I did not see any battery issues either. I would like to investigate more, but my wife just left me home with 4 kiddos, so I need to watch them. It does look like your device did not have gps though...

flight.jpg
 
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is that the same file?
I was wondering the same earlier in this thread. If you upload the file to Healthy Drones, you do in fact see more data.
 
The healthy drones report seems to show like he flew out and back and then out again, did you do that or did you just fly out?
 
Yes, I flew out once, got a RTH, let it come back some and cancelled the RTH then flew out in a slightly different direction before disaster struck. I had cancelled RTH before without any issue. The drone was newish, first flown around the beginning of the month and the battery was new as well. Probably had about 12 to 15 flights in total on the drone. The battery less because I had two batteries and alternated them. Power was close to 100% when I started, 40% when it went down. Thanks for your time.


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I would do what I could to find it, then claim manufacturing defect. If that didn't work I'd sell it on eBay for as is.


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