Welcome DJI Spark Pilot!
Jump in and join our free Spark community today!
Sign up

Explanation of WIFI screen please

SirThomas

Well-Known Member
Join
Mar 2, 2019
Messages
62
I've been having an issue of video dropouts and pixilation and I'm working through various troubleshooting items to determine if it is the phone or the drone. The reason I say this is that my first unit had an unfortunate high-altitude encounter with a tree so it was sent out for repair/replace. Unit was solid and fine. What came back was another unit and since then I'll get these lag/pixelation issues. One possibility is that antenna on drone is damaged.

So... I've been watching the WiFi screen while flying as well as at rest and see quite a lot of variation of signal strength. My question: does the blue bar indicate the signal strength of the received signal from the drone to the RC? How do I read that WiFi screen of red bars and blue bar? (I'm using RC without OTG cable). I would expect that only a few feet away I would be getting full signal (80dBm) but I'll see that blue bar mostly down in the weeds with the other channel signals.
 
Did a little more experimentation with other phone which has a Wifi signal analyzer app on it (only 2.4GHz, though). It appears that RC to phone connection is on a 2.4GHz link even when the WiFi screen shows "current channel" to be in 5GHz band. Tried to force connection down to 2.4 band, and said it did that but I did not see the drone advertising an SSID so I'm assuming it doesn't broadcast one. Still, I would expect to see signal level on DJ4 screen to be full bar if drone is sitting next to the RC. Curious what is going on.
 
As far as I understand the Wifi chart, it is depicting the band & channel that have the least amount of interference, and then auto-selects.

IME, the controller tends to select 2.4Ghz, most likely to opt for the farthest range. 5.8Ghz is much less crowded, but its reach is much less in comparison.

Since you mentioned you have a WiFi analysis app, I suspect you use an Android device. Since there are 100’s of device makers, and probably 1000’s of OS variants, it adds a lot of variables. You might have a bad antenna, but it could also be a different Revision level of other components also.

Does your SD card show poor video also?

Is there any reason you don’t use an OTG cable? I switched to one, and have had no problems at all. I use IOS devices also.
 
Get an OTG cable so the remote doesn't have to use WIFI to reach your phone.
 

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
14,593
Messages
118,799
Members
17,988
Latest member
KguaooNex