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Flew Mavic 2E in Large Arena Today

Kbviper

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Jul 18, 2017
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Age
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My daughter was asked to take photos (with a digital camera) at a CrossFit competition that was taking place inside an arena with artificial turf usually used for soccer. After getting permission from the organizers, she asked if I would bring a drone and get some aerial photos and video during the competition.

I reviewed the manual and a lot of online posts about other's experience with trying to fly indoors, many of which ended badly.

The arena has large metal framing and it is well known that there is no cell phone signal in there, so I assumed that there would be no gps signal. There is netting on all of the sides and the ceiling. The surface is green artificial turf, which fortunately, was somewhat mottled, and not all one uniform color. There was also a fair bit of artificial lighting.

I got to the site and started the M2E. Set it to hover if signal was lost, put on the prop guards for the first time, put it in the Tripod Mode, and turned on the vision positioning system. The M2E manual states:
Height is restricted to 16 ft (5 m) when the GPS signal is weak and Downward Vision System is activated.
Height is restricted to 98 ft (30 m) when the GPS signal is weak and Downward Vision System is inactivated.


I took off and went up about 7 feet. The M2E went into a very stable hover. There is about a 25 foot ceiling and when I pushed the left stick forward, it went up to 16 feet and would not go up any further. I moved about 10 feet and pushed the left stick up and it moved up quickly, beyond 16 feet, almost hitting the ceiling. I experienced this repeatedly throughout the day. It would initially stop going up at 16 feet, but after moving laterally, it would eventually go higher, even though the vision positioning system was on and there was no gps signal.

I used 6 batteries over 4 hours and got in over 2 hours of flying times. While the lighting was going, it was not great. Many of the photos where the competitors were moving fast had them blurred. Photos where there was no movement were much better. The quality of the video was very good.

This setup worked good for these circumstances. Having decent lighting, and a surface that was not uniform, allowed the the vision positioning system to keep the drone locked in place when hovering and very stable. This was the first time I had used the prop guards on the M2E and was very pleased with how easy they were to put on, and take off.

A couple of pictures:
 

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Glad it went well but I am concerned that in almost every indoor flight post people have used Tripod Mode when the DJI Manual tells you not to use it if there is no good GPS signal.
 
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