Hi Guys,
So I went out today to get some shots of an old convict era village near my house. there is a magnificent sandstone bridge that I wanted to get a shot of flying over. I'll preface this by saying that the bridge has no (or very very limited) metal in it and sparkles was never actually anywhere near it.
I did all my preflight checks including checking for magnetic inteference and making sure it was responding well to all controls
So I sent sparkles up to about 40m from about 200m from the bridge.
I began to head towards the bridge when I got a message saying 'Magnetic filed interference exit p-gps' and then another saying weak gps signal and then it went into ATTI mode. It then banked to the right and began to just drift off into the distance. Initially I panicked but then I quickly realised that it was still responding to the remote. Thankfully it was in line of site so I gently guided it back to directly above me then droped the altitude so that if it took off again it would at least clip a tree and I could try to catch it. As I brought it back everything kicked back in and seemed fine.
I had 15 satelites at the time.
So after this I took it to a wide open cricket field with no metal or any other interference. Started it up, all good, no errors. Flew about 30m away and I had the same warnings and same issue it just started to drift across the field.
I took it back, landed it and recalibrated the compass and for the next half hour I was flying around with no issues.
So my question is what the hell went wrong? Nothing had changed since my last flight and there was no metal or anything around. Surely if there are compass issues that recalibrating seems to have fixed there would be a warning in the app to recalibrate? If it's going to do this how can I trust flying it a few hundred metres away and ever getting it back?
So I went out today to get some shots of an old convict era village near my house. there is a magnificent sandstone bridge that I wanted to get a shot of flying over. I'll preface this by saying that the bridge has no (or very very limited) metal in it and sparkles was never actually anywhere near it.
I did all my preflight checks including checking for magnetic inteference and making sure it was responding well to all controls
So I sent sparkles up to about 40m from about 200m from the bridge.
I began to head towards the bridge when I got a message saying 'Magnetic filed interference exit p-gps' and then another saying weak gps signal and then it went into ATTI mode. It then banked to the right and began to just drift off into the distance. Initially I panicked but then I quickly realised that it was still responding to the remote. Thankfully it was in line of site so I gently guided it back to directly above me then droped the altitude so that if it took off again it would at least clip a tree and I could try to catch it. As I brought it back everything kicked back in and seemed fine.
I had 15 satelites at the time.
So after this I took it to a wide open cricket field with no metal or any other interference. Started it up, all good, no errors. Flew about 30m away and I had the same warnings and same issue it just started to drift across the field.
I took it back, landed it and recalibrated the compass and for the next half hour I was flying around with no issues.
So my question is what the hell went wrong? Nothing had changed since my last flight and there was no metal or anything around. Surely if there are compass issues that recalibrating seems to have fixed there would be a warning in the app to recalibrate? If it's going to do this how can I trust flying it a few hundred metres away and ever getting it back?