New member,still trying to learn

[Hotrod]

I have had my Phantom for about 3 weeks now. I have read and reread the manual and watched countless YouTube video,s But I still do not fully understand everything about my phantom.

I recently came very close to losing my bird in a flyaway. When I went looking for it I tried to use the "find my drone" feature in the vision app. It seems that this feature is more or less useless to help find a missing drone. If I understand how it works, it shows where the home location is, the place where you hope the drone will return, and also where you are in relation to that spot. That is not much help when the drone is gone out of sight and not returned. I walked a mile thinking I was getting close to the landing spot only to find out I was heading back to here I launched from.
I got really lucky, I turned the vision app back on to try to see what the camera was seeing. It was looking at some grass (not very helpful) but the range readout said it was only 25 ft. away. I had driven for a mile in the general direction of the flyaway and parked my car that close to the landing spot. Dumb luck. And it missed a power line and a fence while coming down and landed in a small patch of grass along side of a roadway.

Can anyone suggest a good GPS locator to mount on these things?

Thanks

 

[rrmccabe]

The problem with "find my Phantom" is it relies on the WIFI connectivity. So it can only show the last point you HAD WIFI connectivity.

You were lucky the battery stayed in as they sometimes pop out. Since yours stayed powered you lucked out.

There seems to be pros and cons to every type locator. One con is many of them rely on cellular to transmit the last known location back to you. So if you get in a bad cell spot you have same issue as the find my phantom. And if it powers off the Phantom battery then you have same battery pop out issue. If you don't go that route you have another thing to charge.

I chose a Marco Polo device because it needs no cellular plan, has REALLY long battery life as you can track it for a week if needed, its durable. Its not as easy as looking on a map for it, but it does in fact work.

I am sure more seasoned pilots will chime in. I am pretty new but this was my pick.

Avoid any of the Bluetooth deals that rely on crowd sharing.

As I said, lots of options. Lots of pros and cons.

 

[BaldEagle]

Hi -

See viewtopic.php?f=4&t=26051 and viewtopic.php?f=4&t=18243



After spending time reading about

Marco Polo http://eurekaproducts.com/
Tagg http://www.pettracker.com/
UAV Locator http://www.drone-mods.com/Drone-Mods-UA ... -DM005.htm

I'm leaning toward the Marco Polo as well.