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- May 7, 2017
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Fellow enthusiasts,
I am coming up on a year as a mavic enthusiast. When I joined this forum, the veterans had been here since the product launched in October 2016 and it has been a fun and entertaining journey with all you fellow techno nerd/geeks (who are my favorite people in the world).
I have learned from the literally multiple thousands of posts here that the majority of us are career engineers or technologists in one discipline or another. In all my dealings with groups over my life, this is the smartest/cleverest concentration of folks I have ever worked with and it is truly a pleasure to interact and socialize with most of you.
My career technology has been with commercial Wi-Fi radio systems. After many many hours of observing and testing the mavic radio systems over the last year, I have concluded that the proprietary mavic radio systems are very closely related to the Wi-Fi radio chipsets and protocol behaviors. Subsequently, we are able to leverage hardware and techniques in the Wi-Fi world to the mavic radio systems to scratch the itch of those "mod" freaks in our group of enthusiasts.
I have a years worth of scattered posts in many threads that are very technical and not very useable for the typical drone pilot. So I decided to start a new thread here to compile and boil down the most usable bits of information related to mavic radio system mods for both the remote control (RC) and aircraft (AC).
I will have a few main sections to this thread. The first to be detailed now is what I am calling the "baseline" that covers the factory radio settings for the RC and AC. Once that is fully covered in detail, I will post the next section that enables the mavic radio "boost" mod and then compare it against the baseline. If we do not get the baseline details out of the way first, anything after that has no reference and IMHO is useless information. Then I have 4 different models of RF amplifiers to test on both the RC and AC and report the performance of each device. And along the way, I will test a handful of the most popular antennas and report their performance.
All of this will take some time, but I will try to add regular updates weekly until all of the variations have been tested and reported.
Regards,
@beanbubba
NOTE: I WILL EDIT THIS INITIAL POST WITH VIDEO UPDATES, CHECK BACK HERE FOR UPDATES OVER TIME.
:::
Mavic Radio System Observations 2.0
Birdside baseline.
Mavic Radio System Observations 2.1
Birdside+amplifier baseline.
Mavic Radio System Observations 3.0
Standalone amplifier baseline.
Mavic Radio System Observations 3.1
Continuous carrier amplifier baseline.
Mavic Radio System Observations 3.2
Aircraft and remote controller new baseline.
Antenna Coverage Visualization 1.0
This is a google earth video I did to help visualize different antenna types against the Grand Canyon as a backdrop. This was a simulation to help train laymen on antenna characteristics:
VIDEO: Antenna Coverage Visualization 1.0
Amplifier comparison results (for all DUT's) for both TX and RX across the entire receiver sensitivity range.
Mavic Radio System Observations 4.0
DJI Go4 Boost Mod
VIDEO: Mavic Radio Observations 4.0
Mavic Radio System Observations 4.1
Boost vs Factory Amplifier Comparison
VIDEO: Mavic Radio Observations 4.1
Fresnel Zone Intro for Drone Pilots (pdf attached to this post):
I am coming up on a year as a mavic enthusiast. When I joined this forum, the veterans had been here since the product launched in October 2016 and it has been a fun and entertaining journey with all you fellow techno nerd/geeks (who are my favorite people in the world).
I have learned from the literally multiple thousands of posts here that the majority of us are career engineers or technologists in one discipline or another. In all my dealings with groups over my life, this is the smartest/cleverest concentration of folks I have ever worked with and it is truly a pleasure to interact and socialize with most of you.
My career technology has been with commercial Wi-Fi radio systems. After many many hours of observing and testing the mavic radio systems over the last year, I have concluded that the proprietary mavic radio systems are very closely related to the Wi-Fi radio chipsets and protocol behaviors. Subsequently, we are able to leverage hardware and techniques in the Wi-Fi world to the mavic radio systems to scratch the itch of those "mod" freaks in our group of enthusiasts.
I have a years worth of scattered posts in many threads that are very technical and not very useable for the typical drone pilot. So I decided to start a new thread here to compile and boil down the most usable bits of information related to mavic radio system mods for both the remote control (RC) and aircraft (AC).
I will have a few main sections to this thread. The first to be detailed now is what I am calling the "baseline" that covers the factory radio settings for the RC and AC. Once that is fully covered in detail, I will post the next section that enables the mavic radio "boost" mod and then compare it against the baseline. If we do not get the baseline details out of the way first, anything after that has no reference and IMHO is useless information. Then I have 4 different models of RF amplifiers to test on both the RC and AC and report the performance of each device. And along the way, I will test a handful of the most popular antennas and report their performance.
All of this will take some time, but I will try to add regular updates weekly until all of the variations have been tested and reported.
Regards,
@beanbubba
NOTE: I WILL EDIT THIS INITIAL POST WITH VIDEO UPDATES, CHECK BACK HERE FOR UPDATES OVER TIME.
:::
Mavic Radio System Observations 2.0
Birdside baseline.
Mavic Radio System Observations 2.1
Birdside+amplifier baseline.
Mavic Radio System Observations 3.0
Standalone amplifier baseline.
Mavic Radio System Observations 3.1
Continuous carrier amplifier baseline.
Mavic Radio System Observations 3.2
Aircraft and remote controller new baseline.
Antenna Coverage Visualization 1.0
This is a google earth video I did to help visualize different antenna types against the Grand Canyon as a backdrop. This was a simulation to help train laymen on antenna characteristics:
VIDEO: Antenna Coverage Visualization 1.0
Amplifier comparison results (for all DUT's) for both TX and RX across the entire receiver sensitivity range.
Mavic Radio System Observations 4.0
DJI Go4 Boost Mod
VIDEO: Mavic Radio Observations 4.0
Mavic Radio System Observations 4.1
Boost vs Factory Amplifier Comparison
VIDEO: Mavic Radio Observations 4.1
Fresnel Zone Intro for Drone Pilots (pdf attached to this post):
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