I have my distance setting all the way to max. One way around this is to bring a smartphone along with the dji go app installed. Each time, I would have to connect the controller to the app/smartdevice and then I can upon/after takeoff unplug the phone/ipad from the rest of the controller and I can fly with only the controller and not be limited to 99 feet....
However if you try a brand new flight with only the controller and not initially plugged into an app/phone, you will not be able to go beyond the 99 feet max radius.
The distance setting has nothing to do with the built in limitation that DJI set for when you just use the controller without app....
Sometimes I just want to go to the park or beach or along empty stretch of something and fly visually with just the controller and not using a hookup to some ipad or phone. My first drone was a syma s107, sure that thing was basic, but did it require an app, connection to a tablet, did it have NFZ, did it need firmware updates, did it force user to take a "quiz" using the app before allowing to fly? No to all.... The point is there is nothing in the FAA rules that "require" the use of an smartphone or app to be connected to the remote controller, and there is nothing in the rules that dictate an artificial boundary of 99 feet! The vast majority of the time VLOS can be maintained well outside of the 99 feet limitation! It should be up to the user to follow the law not the DJI to artifically cap. I mean its illegal to drive upon the speed limit, does this mean Toyota should cap all cars to max of 50mph?
This would be more true with controllers like the Spark and Mini that don't display telemetry, but with the Mavic controllers with the telemetry on the controller itself that gives all the awareness that is needed. The current FAA rules require VLOS but says nothing about the manufacturing mandating an electronic lease of only 99feet! That is like a car manufacturer making a speed cap at 60mph even though on some roads there allows 70mph! (on good days I can clearly see the Mavic Pro at 200 feet or more!) In addition, this wasn't locked down in the first version of the mavic because I clearly remember being able to do this, then later they retroactively locked it down with a firmware update, the important thing to note is that there is currently NO law that requires this, DJI simply decided to do it because it is control freak, and not only that, limited it to well within VLOS, I mean a could understand a limit of say 200 feet, but 99 feet is just ridicioulous! ... so it wasn't like this was a huge concern or oversight at the time that they later fixed. DJI made the decision to continue to force more and more training wheels. Why isn't there a setting for people who wish to override this? Even then, why isn't there a way to apply for DJI to get an exception or for example to have a more reasonable limit/radius, something that would still put the Mavic within VLOS but not as restrictive as merely 99 feet ?
I used to be able to go to this one park near my home, no NFZ zones for miles... Sometimes I wanted to fly the original Mavic Pro drone just by hand and only using the Remote Controller without having to connect it to any smartphone. It would let me do that and even when the original Mavic went pretty far away where it was only a dot in the sky, I could still bring it back using the parameters displayed on the RC itself in terms of distance to "dead reckon" myself back in the general direction until I could get a clear idea of the Mavic's bearing/heading and bring it back.
With the
Mavic 2 Pro, recently I was doing a same flight at the same park and noticed that this time it was like an invisible bounding box or sphere/dome was keeping my Mavic from being able to be flown to any distance away past a short threshold. Of course if I connect it to my phone it allows it to fly further, but I hadn't put the MC2 in "beginner mode" and also hadn't put any kind of distance restrictions on it.
In any case, with the new FAA Remote ID rules requiring active Internet connection just to be able to start engines, takeoff and fly at all, this kinda converges into that rule to some extent...
Its sad that legislation and regulations will effectively kill off the hobby drone industry within 3 years. Probably why DJI is diversifying into nondrone stuff a lot more now, plus in 2020 dji will end up on US entity list like Huawei and ZTE