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First: ATTI-mode with no video feed, then: full disconnect to the RC – what's up?

miemo

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Had a scary flight the other evening, and not quite sure what exactly went on… Any thoughts on the following incident report? Sorry, a longish rant. 😅

Was flying just ~100 m away at 15–50m height with completely clear line-of-sight between the controller & the drone. First without any issues for 6 minutes, then first got notice on aircraft being switched to ATTI-mode, followed more or less immediately with the loss of video feed (image turns to grayscale on the screen). The controls still worked at this point and as the drone was really close it was easy to manouvere for manual return, but then suddenly I also loose manual controls from the RC as the RC seems to be completely disconnected from the drone and the RC starts beeping. The drone hovers for a while, after which it starts the automatic RTH. Lands safely in a bit luckily, but interestingly I do not regain connection to drone at any point which usually would happen if you just had a temporary blockage of the signal. I restarted the drone after it hand landed and it did connect to the RC normally. Haven't flown since yet.

Debuggin info from the log is a bit weird: there's only two 0.1 second entries with ATTI being recorded as OSD.flycState, quickly returning to P-GPS and Gentle GPS after that. 32 satellite connections before, during and after the ATTI moment. Also full up&downlink signal strength to/from the RC, eventhough the video feed was already blocked at this point. For the moments when I'm flying blind, i.e. without any video feed look normal from the logs, as if everything would be A-OK. At around 7 minutes, about a minute after the loss of visual feed the RC.downlinkSignal in the log drops to 18 from 100 which it has been so far and with the "Weak image transmission signal. Adjust antennas (Code: 80004).; Weak signal. Adjust antennas." error message on the same timestamp. This is the last log entry as this is also the point where all connection between the drone and the RC was lost. It soon starts the automatic RTH.

I can sort of understand the loss of GPS as I was flying quite low on a "canyon" between two massive buildings in urban area over water and could even maybe understand that the enviroment might mess with the video feed somewhat. But what is indeed weird is how the log doesn't correspond to the loss of video feed, and how I never regain connection to the drone eventhough the RTH height was set to 100m so it flew way higher then any of the nearby obstacles before starting to head back the short ~100m horizontal distance.

Any thoughts on what might have been the cause here and was this just a situational glitch?


Log viewer of the flight:

Log CSV for all the details (have marked the ~6 minute point with the ATTI-moment in orange highlight):

Photo for visual context, with drone's approximate position marked as red dot when the situation started:
DJI_0034.jpg
 
@Meta4 is an expert on this.
 
Debuggin info from the log is a bit weird: there's only two 0.1 second entries with ATTI being recorded as OSD.flycState, quickly returning to P-GPS and Gentle GPS after that. 32 satellite connections before, during and after the ATTI moment. Also full up&downlink signal strength to/from the RC
At 6:18.0 and 6:18.1 the drone doesn't lose GPS sats and the column labelled Is GPS used says Yes.
The RC Downlink and RC Upling stay at 100% as well so it looks like the weak GPS message and Atti are a glitch in the data.

 
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At 6:18.0 and 6:18.1 the drone doesn't lose GPS sats and the column labelled Is GPS used says Yes.
The RC Downlink and RC Upling stay at 100% as well so it looks like the weak GPS message and Atti are a glitch in the data.

Yeah, obviously either one of those data points is incorrect there – the num of the GPS connections OR the ATTI-mode.

Given that the video feed was also lost at that point while the Up&Downlink show full connection, I'd be prone to mistrust the log data. Or then there's a completely separate issue that's not connected to the actual data feed quality but just some software glitch on the controller…
 
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