Newby looking for advice (flight times & Voltage)

[Browneee]

Hi there all, I'm new to the forum & Phantoms .

I've had my P1 two weeks now... Flown it a bunch of times (only had one battery:-(). I purchased three "zippy 20C series 2200 Lipo's. I also purchased a Feiyu Tech G3 (what a pain to install.)

Before the new batteries & gimbal I was getting a little over 10 minutes flight time. Now I get 4 may be 5 mins max before auto land . I upgraded the NASA firmware today also.

Obviously the gimbal will drain power for itself, but will it cut flight time by half?, or is there a problem with the firmware upgrade , how do I roll it back to original firmware?.

Also, can you play around with the voltage limits ?. What's the lowest safe level you guys are going to ?. I'm too scared to touch these settings.....

Regards Rob

 

[OI Photography]

Hi Rob, welcome. You're running in to two issues here:

1. Although the power drawn by the gimbal itself is very small (not enough to have a significant impact on flight time), the weight of it can have a very big effect. With the Phantom, the general rule of thumb is that each gram of added weight will rob you of approximately one second of flight time. Adding a 200g gimbal + camera combo can shave off over 4 minutes of time.

2. The zippy batteries you bought are not known for living up to their true capacity rating. They're nice and cheap, but they're not going to deliver even what the DJI stock batteries will.

There's a few things you can do here to help:

-Trim every bit of unnecessary weight
-Start using DJI's 9" props
-Get a better and/or higher capacity battery. I'm currently testing some options at 2700mAh and up that will fit in the P1 battery bay, results will be posted in this section as soon as I have them wrapped up. I can tell you now that there's several affordable worthwhile options...they'll cost more than the zippy's (usually around $30/batt) but it's money well spent.

 

[Browneee]

Firstly thank you for the reply.

Yes the Zippys were cheap ;-). I had an idea the addition of the gimbal would rob it of precious flight time. My first flights with just the stock camera mount lasted almost 11 minutes and that was to the first "LED" warning. I was freaking out as I was over water chasing my boat and had my first "carrier landing" on the bow of the boat .

Regarding 9" props! I was wondering if I could bolt them on and what would the effects be ?.

Have another question ?, what effects do those external dual battery trays have ?, weight/increased flight time/effects on stability ?.

One more question while I think of it. In the Nasam program does anyone alter the warning voltage ? Last night I flew around my back yard, as expected after 4/5 minutes the flashing started, so then I flew around in ground affect ( prob about a foot off the ground) untill I had no choice but to land, about another 4 maybe 6 minutes flight. Then ran it at flight idle untill the motors stopped. Reason for this, I wanted to connect to computer and see what voltage was. I must have ran it so flat it wouldn't even register on the program .

Thanks in advance for any replies