Lost sight of and lost my drone in forest canopy

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Garden Route - South Africa
I was about to give full background but then tried to reduce it to the basic facts.
Flew my P3S over ocean to scout water for bait dropping. The area has no Cellular or internet coverage, just nature and the mighty ocean.
Received several warning messages (signal loss, GPS, ATTI mode, firmware upgrade) and after a while RTH was initiated
Lost sight of and lost my drone in forest canopy behind Home Point and spent 4 hours searching unsuccessfully.
Managed to retrieve coordinates and with help of farmer’s GPS devise located P3 on top of canopy where it landed upside down and undamaged 30m from Home Point
After the near disastrous trip used PhantomHelp website to retrieve log information and used it to try to analyze flight to find out what went wrong including my inexperience. I don’t know how to analyse but I include link to see if someone can help
DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com
I also downloaded the following file
I am learning faster than I expected and just discovered this thread and copied the guide from sar104 and I need to understand what went wrong.
Thanks and appreciated
 

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  • DJIFlightRecord_2020-09-08_[11-21-21].txt
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I was about to give full background but then tried to reduce it to the basic facts.
Flew my P3S over ocean to scout water for bait dropping. The area has no Cellular or internet coverage, just nature and the mighty ocean.
Received several warning messages (signal loss, GPS, ATTI mode, firmware upgrade) and after a while RTH was initiated
Lost sight of and lost my drone in forest canopy behind Home Point and spent 4 hours searching unsuccessfully.
Managed to retrieve coordinates and with help of farmer’s GPS devise located P3 on top of canopy where it landed upside down and undamaged 30m from Home Point
After the near disastrous trip used PhantomHelp website to retrieve log information and used it to try to analyze flight to find out what went wrong including my inexperience. I don’t know how to analyse but I include link to see if someone can help
DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com
I also downloaded the following file
I am learning faster than I expected and just discovered this thread and copied the guide from sar104 and I need to understand what went wrong.
Thanks and appreciated
Could you retrieve the .DAT from the P3 itself. Follow these instructions How to retrieve a .DAT The .DAT you want is FLY270.DAT You'll need to upload it to something like Dropbox and provide a link to the uploaded .DAT.
 
I need to understand what went wrong.
Your drone was affected by a yaw error which usually comes from the spot where you started up the drone.
Your drone uses a magnetic compass and gyro sensors for directional guidance.
The gyros need to be initialised on starting up the drone, so they can provide accurate direction data.
It takes its initialisation from the magnetic compass, but if the drone's compass was placed close enough to a steel object, the compass will be deflected and the initialisation of the gyros will be wrong.

It appears that the yaw error was small (if it was larger, the drone wouldn't have gone at high speed and disappeared).
@BudWalker will be able to tell more from the .dat file if you can post that.

What can you say to describe your launch spot?
What was the surface you launched from or what steel objects might have been close?
 
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Thanks Meta4. I launched from a wooden deck in front of the house after calibrating the compass of the AC. I think the structure had big steel screws and it was next to a concrete slab that may have had some steel reinforcing in it. I viewed the .KMZ on Google Earth and it had a lot of red dots with messages on it. Unfortunately I am unable to attach the .kmz file to this post as it doesn't recognise it.
 
Thanks Meta4. I launched from a wooden deck in front of the house after calibrating the compass of the AC. I think the structure had big steel screws and it was next to a concrete slab that may have had some steel reinforcing in it. I viewed the .KMZ on Google Earth and it had a lot of red dots with messages on it. Unfortunately I am unable to attach the .kmz file to this post as it doesn't recognise it.
If the concrete was a couple of feet below the deck, it wouldn't have been an issue.
But a steel screw close to the landing gear can.
 
Thanks Andy. The chapter is closed because I eventually managed to extract the .DAT file and sent it to Bud Walker to investigate, just to realise that the file I needed was overwritten by newer .DAT files. At least I now know how to extract a .DAT file from a P3S using a MacOSX platfor.
 

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