Furthest flight yet.

[Tentoes]

The farthest I've had Phoebe is 1700 ft.

I was WAY out in very open country, miles from ANYTHING. Wasn't sure I was still seeing the drone or just a floater in my eyes. Telemetry said I was up pretty high and I could plainly see nothing was around, so I just hauled back on the stick till I saw her coming. Had an ear on her the whole time. Thought about going out to 2000 ft, but decided I was not REALLY in visual line of sight.

 

[Northwood Mediaworks]

I was WAY out in very open country, miles from ANYTHING. Wasn't sure I was still seeing the drone or just a floater in my eyes. Telemetry said I was up pretty high and I could plainly see nothing was around, so I just hauled back on the stick till I saw her coming. Had an ear on her the whole time. Thought about going out to 2000 ft, but decided I was not REALLY in visual line of sight.

Thats why I invested in a strobe (Arc2 white) to put on the back of the bird... I can see it much further away now. I liked it so much I am ordering another three, and will figure out a way to present them so I can see from any angle.

 

[Spark 317]

I am ordering another three, and will figure out a way to present them so I can see from any angle.

Please make sure that the strobes are mounted away from the bottom camera!

I had one on the bottom next to the camera and the intense flashing of the strobe caused the Spark to hop up and down because the VPS was compromised.

It resulted in a very erratic 34 second flight from launch to a "safe" crash landing from 20 feet.

I have since mounted the strobes onto the prop guards or directly on the sides of the Spark if not using the guards.

The flash doesn't seem to effect the Spark at all since moving them.

This member mounted his on inexpensive landing gear that worked well for him.

 

[Vader01]

I gave it a shot after your original post. I got to 5,388 before the RTH kicked in. Same as with you, after 5 seconds of signal loss the RTH sent the bird home. Its interesting looking at the telemetry on airdata, you can see the speed change when the drone loses signal. It slowly stops and seems to just hover until it either regains signal or initiates the RTH. I was only at around 140 feet above ground when I attepted this. I think higher altitude would probably help with getting more distance. It would be easy to go further than this with a Litchi waypoint mission, but I like the idea of distance testing while actually being on the sticks in FPV

Nice, I kept going higher as my flight log shows when the signal became weak till I finally lost it and it RTH. Guess I'll need to charge up my bionic eye so I can have better focus if I decide to do another range test. ??