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Matt W

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My fun all started with replacing a front right motor. I noticed the motor was hot, burn my finger hot. There was a lot of rotation resistance. Time to watch you tube to see how to replace it! After a 28 minute video I said to myself “I can do that”.

It was all going great until it was time to remove the antenna line from the circuit board. The guy in the video just popped it off, simple. I popped mine off and off came the connection on the circuit board with it. ****!!!!

So now what? Send it in for a billion dollar repair or just hope it will work with 3 antennas? The cobwebs in my wallet persuaded me to go with the latter. I put it all back together with no further incidents.

While I was contemplating actually powering it up, I had visions of it blasting off like a rocket out of control smashing a bunch of stuff and slicing me up something fierce. My visions proved wrong thankfully, it powered up just fine, everything checked normal save for no gps since I was in my house.

Ok time to fly. I did a manual start up and launch. Hovered just perfect in my dining room. All controls normal. Great! The motor repair worked.....now about that little antenna issue.

I headed out to a construction site I am getting progressive shots of. Start up revealed no issues/errors. I did a precision takeoff, perfect. Climbed straight up to 190 ft. Perfect. I had 13 gps satellites but still in atti mode(???). Flew to line up my shots and the worst thing ever happened.... no SD card! Ug! 190 ft up, about a city blocks distance away at max distance and I was down 1 antenna signal bar. First time I’ve ever seen it not at full strength.

Got some internal pix and hit the return to home. It flew back to the descent spot but it would not descend. That’s a first. So I pulled down on only the left stick and it landed on a dime. So what’s the moral of the story? Put a spare SD card in your flight bag. No I wanted to post this Incase anyone else went through the same wringer and thought about flushing their bird away thinking it will never fly again. You may not be able to fly past visual sight but hey, we don’t do that anyway right. Right?

In case you’re wondering about the original problem, one of the magnets in the motor broke. See attached pix.
 
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You only have two antennas for communications to the remote control, one in each of the front legs, the other two antenna cables go to the Wi-Fi card at the rear of the drone for Wi-Fi signals I believe.
(my drone is a fix up of a couple of crashed drones, and my main board doesn't have a flat cable connector for the wi-fi board as the ham fisted previous owner somehow managed to strip it off the board completely, as well as breaking one of the connectors off the end of the wi-fi co-ax cable, then trying to push it into the connector on the board and just fill it in with solder. no issue for me, I would never use wi-fi).

If you can find a replacement main board, it's not difficult to replace, just have to be careful of the connectors, the four co-ax connectors and , I think, 3 flat connectors.
Main board are expensive to buy, but if you can find a crashed drone you might be able to salvage the board (often it's camera and/or arm and/or ESC damage). No reason not to keep flying if it's working for you, but might be worth keeping an eye out for a cheap crashed unit (you also get other spares out of it as well, just i case).
 
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