Mavic 2 Pro - Smart Controller lost connection to AC

[ake]

I'm somewhat new pilot and have not had any issues or crashes with my Mavic 2 Pro. Until now. This morning I was taking some pictures of sunrise in my backyard, drone hovering at about 90m above me. I had two controllers connected to the AC, Smart Controller as a primary controller, and the "regular" controlled with iPad as a secondary controller.

Suddenly my Smart Controller lost the connection to AC. The secondary controller lost only the video feed connection. While I rebooted the primary controller, my partner was able to control the drone with the secondary controller. After the reboot the primary controller re-connected, and I was able to take over the control again & fly the AC safely back home.

I'd like to know what caused the disconnection. How do I do that? Which logs would have information about what happened? Should I contact DJI & ask them to analyze this?

 

[Marty Markoe]

DJI drones have reported problems for years when drone pointed directly at sun.

 

[tlswift58]

Don't freak. My Air2 disconnects a fair amount for a few seconds. Signal interference / etc causes it. I'd not suggest rebooting the SC - just give it a bit of time to reconnect. Since you had a 2nd controller and it lost video feed - that kind of answers the issue - signal interference of some type that blocked both controllers.

If you fly near power lines / etc - all that can disrupt the signal(s). Again don't freak unless you are flying over water and you have your drone set to LAND when this happens. I have mine set to HOVER, so that it gives the drone / controller time to reconnect and keep flying.

 

[ake]

Thanks for the answers!

The disconnect was not brief, I think I rebooted the controller after a minute or so. And I thing the root cause could have been radio interference (as you pointed out earlier).

I'd like to confirm this by checking from the logs what actually happened, but I don't know which logs would tell it to me. I also noticed the AC logs (which I downloaded from the drone with DJI PC app) are encoded/encrypted(?), is there a way to interpret them with some tool/software?

 

[ake]

Update: Tonight I was planning to capture some sunset pictures using the same setup as described above. This time I had a new problem: I was not able to adjust the gimbal tilt at all. On the display the gimbal tilt angle indicator was greyed out (it turned back to white occasionally for a second, but went back to grey again). When I was taking the drone down the video feed was very shaky, like the gimbal was not working at all.

I took the drone down, restarted it, and the gimbal started working again OK.

I'm not confident my drone is working as it should, and would like to report it to DJI. What is the best way to do it?

 

[Floodair]

Update: Tonight I was planning to capture some sunset pictures using the same setup as described above. This time I had a new problem: I was not able to adjust the gimbal tilt at all. On the display the gimbal tilt angle indicator was greyed out (it turned back to white occasionally for a second, but went back to grey again). When I was taking the drone down the video feed was very shaky, like the gimbal was not working at all.

I took the drone down, restarted it, and the gimbal started working again OK.

I'm not confident my drone is working as it should, and would like to report it to DJI. What is the best way to do it?

Good luck with that. I have had the same issue with my smart controller for a while. I contacted DJI several times and they couldn't figure out what was going on. They had me send in the drone, smart controller and stock controller just to tell me there was nothing wrong with my equipment. Let me know if you find a fix. Thanks in advance.

 

[ake]

I contacted Mavic support, and the only advice they had was to send all equipment back to them for investigation (at my cost). I was asking them if they could advice me how to get the detailed logs out from the drone & controller for investigation, but got no meaningful response.

I've not had the issues again, and I'm assuming my problems were due low temperature (it was about +5 Celsius).