So, this takes me back to why the downward looking sensors thought it was almost on the ground? Why did it start climbing when, while it was out to sea, all I did, as usual, is hit RTH?
Your saying there was an obstruction to the downward looking sensors. This makes sense to me. Lets say they "saw" the bait dropper. In flight I guess it would think it was too close to the ground and so in P-GPS mode starts climbing? Trying to RTH would have the same problem then?
Sorry ... the spreadsheet has 10000 lines of data so I didn't examine everything and stopped when I thought I had enough to explain the issue.
Looking further, I see the VPS was giving incorrect data intermittently until about 10:59, possibly related to the pitch of the aircraft which would mean the sensors were not pointing down vertically and might "see" the obstruction of the bait dropper.
I see an uncommanded climb at 11:13 and while it's hard to explain, it's a reasonable assumption that this is related to the VPS readings.
I'd suggest removing the obstruction to VPS and doing a test flight to confirm that everything else is as it should be.
I suspect it will be.
Obstacle avoidance messages could be triggered by flying towards a low, bright sun.
These come from the forward looking sensors.
But still should have been able to bring it home in ATTI mode.
The intermittent VPS issue was still there in atti mode and preventing descent when it was giving falase altitude readings.
What I want to do is to NOT have to turn off the security features of the drone just to be able to use a bait dropper. That seems unreasonable to me. I don't think the downward looking sensors have a sufficiently wide angle view to see something under the camera, reading the specs. And it has worked over and over. But I am still suspicious that is the cause.
The downward facing sensors aren't really much use, I wouldn't consider them a security feature.
The drone is not always level in flight.
Is bait dropper rigid or does it move?
It could be that when it tilts or rolls that the sensors can "see" it.
Sorry, while you are being so indulgent, would you say my iPad is underpowered, or am I misinterpreting that? Can fly these without any ipad/iphone/android device anyway, so doesn't feel like the iPad can cause problems, yet the error messages about cache full, and the other one about the mobile device, seems point to my ipad.......
Those messages are just letting you know that it has no more room in its cache.
You could clear the cache and/or adjust the settings to stop filling the cache with