The potential issues with grey market products and warranty claims is familiar to most I would suspect- as might be VAT and customs processes. In any case neither are relevant to your claim or the question. Why would the fact a mavic mini that is type approved for operation in the USA (FCC complied) need to be sent to DJI USA for service?Firstly, it's not a claim - it's a fact. DJI knows which units they have sent for sale in which region and it's recorded with the serial number.
So, units shipped for sale in the US will have to go back to the US repair center, units sent for sale in Asia will have to go back to the Asian repair center and so on. There are many threads on this forum by people that have bought units in other territories whilst traveling and been annoyed that they can't get it repaired in their home region.
Similarly, people have been charged with import duty. You just need to do a search of the forum.
Don't believe me? Read this:
Don’t Buy DJI On The Grey Market - DJI Guides
Every new DJI drone sells out faster than greased lightning. Before you try other ways to buy one, learn why you should avoid sellers on the grey market.store.dji.com
Or, this:
Risks of Cheap DJI Drones from Grey Market Retailers
Risks of Cheap DJI Drones from the Grey Market With the huge expansion of the technology industry as a consumer market, ways to find cheaper versions of branded products was almost inevitable. It’s been ingrained in us to find the best deals on the products we buy and avoid wasting our money...www.heliguy.com
Or, this:
Buying Grey: Perils of buying grey imported products| Park Cameras Online
www.parkcameras.com
As for tax - you have to be able to prove you paid an import tax when you bought it in order to benefit from not pay tax in the first place. A lot of international dealers are unauthorized so will usually send the packaged marked as a gift to get around it. So, no VAT will have been paid.
I know this from painful experience. I bought a Canon 60D as a grey import and when it failed after two months it would have cost me the same as a new camera to get it repaired as the warranty wasn't valid.
At no point did I say it couldn’t be repaired. I said clearly you’d have to ship it back to the region the unit was intended by DJI to be sold in.
Thank you for the clarification. My direct experience has been different. I was informed by DJI that a product I had intended to purchase outside my country (Australia) could be sent to a the local DJI service centre for repair however it would be at my cost. So the FCC/CE compliance is raised by you simply as a one potential means of determining where the unit was purchased. All good. That will almost certainly prove less relevant than the proof of purchase (sales invoice). One additional hurdle that DJI has is the requirement the item was supplied by an entity on their approved vendor list.
The problem I see is that even if you buy the care refresh,
Me too, Dog. I live over here in the US and these “metric A holics?” don’t impress me either ??
What ever floats their boat...........No. The FCC model will function as it does in the US in other countries with a warning, DJI have commented on this. The CE model will function in the US as it functions elsewhere. It's built into the hardware what frequency it functions on.
According to DJI the difference isn’t hardware- it is the factory flashed firmware.
but also the FCC RC is a different model, maybe only firmware also in this case.
Firmwares are different so you’ll get the right one for your model
Did you read the DJI statement to the FCC posted above. You might draw your own and potentially different conclusions however it seems to be reasonable to conclude the differences in the radio performance are “programmed and locked”, i.e. firmware. As others have said- if you can realise product differences while maintaining the same hardware it is obviously the most profitable and sensible approach. In this case it would seem a no brainer in the DJI engineering department. Two factory level firmwares and different model/RF compliance stickers.
thats a concern we all share, and when we have the great occusync system that is so bloody amazing compared to just wifi, it gives us the confidence to fly and not worry about signal dropouts, no matter how far the drone is from the home point in VLOS and mountainous terrain,i have been blown away by that since my PH3 days ,sadly because of its size and weight the MM is not able to run such a system ,so we will just have to hope that the wifi is up to the job albeit at closer rangeBecause "distance" = better penetration through foliage, around buildings, radio interference, etc. When I talk about range (personally) I want a clear signal at a reasonable distance in real life situations... not necessarily going 5 miles out
I’m not sure size and weight, even heat dissipation and power consumption issues, might be valid assumptions that could serve to preclude the inclusion of occusync. What is occusync, lightbridge, enhanced wifi etc? Clearly they all DJI named transmission systems applied by the marketing department to various transmission schemes. We don’t have details on the actual transmission protocols but clearly they all outperform standard wifi. What we do know is the radio and RF power amplifier IC’s don’t take up significantly more PCB area on the occusync equipped models. Power output isn’t higher either. This is almost certainly a case of not putting your best tech in the cheapest models. It doesn’t make any sense from a marketing perspective.
