Once in a while one buys a piece of equipment that impresses so much that you feel like buying one extra to store in a cupboard, just in case they stop making it, my Bernina 950 industrial sewing machine, Daystate AirWolf MVT PCP air rifle were some of those, and now, the Mavic Mini.
Drone flying was on my bucket list of hobbies, I listened, watched and postponed as battery, mini camera and GPS tech evolved, and Chinese craftsmanship improved.
So I saw an ad for 'refurbished' MM's and the price looked right so I took the leap, little knowing what pleasant advanced tech surprise awaited me! I am a big fan of acquiring 'slightly used' toys, my belief being that 'Friday production mistakes' were already sorted out by the previous owner. The 'refurbished' MM is as new, no matter how hard I looked for traces of previous ownership, I could not find any. Sealed, packaged, new battery and warranty as for new, I'll anytime buy a 'refurbished' DJI product again, this way the savings can be put to use for luxury accessories.
My first obstacle to overcome was the mental block of letting expensive toys, be it cameras, microscopes, metal detectors or anything else valuable simply buzz off into the unknown without me maintaining physical contact with it. (The original capital outlay for the MM had by now grown considerably, phone upgrade, memory cards, extra battery to name but a few, most of which will become paperweights if ever the Mini disappears over the horizon.) This here forum to my rescue, the info is all here, and I absorbed it like a sponge. Steep learning curve but its all here.
My main considerations for wanting a spare Mini in the cupboard:
-It's light and compact. (I do a lot of multi day backpack hiking in the most exquisite locations, every extra ounce counts.)
-As for drone tech, the AI complications are kept to a minimum since it's an 'entry level' model. (As a born individualist I prefer doing things manually as far as possible, this force me to understand and appreciate the hardware and operational principles involved.)
-It is relatively inexpensive as hi-tech hobbies go, the amount of hi-tech for money spent is mind boggling compared to a fancy hand held GPS for instance.
-The camera on this 249gram wonder is very acceptable. (I was an aerial photographer during the infamous Angola border war era doing my national service in the South African Air Force. We used Vinten camera pods mounted to aircraft wings shooting 12 inch wide roll film to record visual detail from the air. All while being shot at sometimes. And here I have a 249g UAV with resolution enough to show me my dog’s long lost tennis ball on my house rooftop from 50m up on an image covering almost a whole street block.)
-It uses uncomplicated easy to maintain battery tech. (My cameras all run on Li-ion batteries, never ever let me down and eventual deterioration is predictable.)
I live in a small town here in South Africa, but with a small tower-less airport nearby, mainly used by recreational pilots and they often push the low-flying rules over town during weekends since the river makes for a nice scenic aerial view and the low-flying for a nice show-off to tourists and girlfriends. That was my first concern, so I set out to determine the height of local obstacles like trees, cell towers and church steeples around me. This would determine the minimum alt any pilot would dare to fly at and that also helped determining my minimum RTH alt. I suck at judging height I soon realized; as good as I am at judging distance, (brought upon by shooting and hiking.) I am fortunate to have wide open uninhabited space next to me, so I could practice hand-eye stick co-ordination and RTH maneuvers before setting off too far by sitting on my garage roof for optimum VLOS. With the roof being metal I had to learn to take-off and land from ground level some distance off since the MM compass would certainly be influenced taking off from said metal roof. Gimbal tilted down in C mode does the remote landing trick.
We are forced to do the CE thing here in South Africa so the initial 480m range was a slight let down, knowing that the ‘Mericans can go much further in FCC mode and they do not pay more for their MM’s than us with our weak ZA currency. And we have the wide open spaces here in South Africa. So I set out to improve the range without breaking laws. I first built a pair of temporary parabolic reflectors using a condensed milk tin and a pool noodle. I gained almost 50% in range. Then I fired up my Cantennator App I use for designing radio antennas and built 2.4 GHz yagi’s using Kydex moldable knife sheath material and 3mm aluminum rods I use for pinning on knife handle scales. The yagi’s and reflectors gave me 1500m range at least... I was happy, so I ordered factory made yagi’s and reflectors knowing that it works. I won’t need more that 1500m since I plan to spend flight time doing photography instead of trying to break distance records.
My first long distance test was conducted during a hike last weekend on an escarpment near the Mozambique border, but wind warnings made me high-tail it back long before I ran out of signal.
So far the single biggest challenge flying the MM was wind awareness. I have a Kestrel hand-held weather station from my precision air rifle shooting kit that comes in very handy but wind up there and down on ground level is a different story altogether as everyone cautions. And when there are mountains involved even more so. The AC orientation display in Fly App comes in very handy in observing wind matters while up there. I took the MM in hand while looking at the orientation display, tilted it every which way to see the changes in orientation display and that correlates with the way the Mini battles wind during flight. Once that was understood I knew when to back off or when to push my luck. The golden rule, learnt over and over from this forum is to NEVER fly distance down-wind; you have to battle up-wind back home with low battery levels.
My biggest let-down so far was hiking/climbing 500m into a treacherous gorge with optimistic plans to film a spectacular waterfall from bottom to top with the MM, only to see it default to ATTI mode over water and for the lack of GPS signal and it refused to ascend more than 5m, as per user manual. And then the ‘hand landing’ procedure in ATTI mode resulted in a dual between desperate me to ‘save’ the Mini and a stubborn Mini, the final outcome being me with a sliced finger, bleeding like a pig, and the Mini sitting safe in its carry case with not even a damaged prop. You live, you learn...and climb 500m back up again.
Things I’ve noticed:
Low light capabilities in photo mode exceed that of video mode, reason being that shutter speed in photo mode drop as low as a full second with ISO pushed to 3200, it cannot possibly maintain 25fps video frame rate while exposing for a full second. The stability in hover is mind boggling to produce relatively sharp images at a full second exposure time, NO way it can be done by hand without a tripod, even though we are talking super wide angle lens here.
The extra 20 deg upward gimbal movement (often forgotten) allowed for by enabling ‘Allow Upward Gimbal Rotation’ comes in handy when composing landscapes with lots of sky; I managed nice panoramas of very interesting cirrus cloud formations.
Signal drop-off while using Yagi’s at end of transmission range is much more sudden than with standard antennas, not much warning before it suddenly happens. Yagi’s and parabolic reflectors are by design very directional, good VLOS and a far away landmark used for orientation makes things easier.
I religiously run a screen capture app while flying, this allows me to do a quick review of stupid things I did and system messages I received while hyped up on adrenalin. (I had a case of an ant hitching a ride on my gimbal, I swore UFO until I had a look at the freeze frames of my screen capture. Scary stuff.)
After coming back from my 450km trip to the hiking spot on some rough roads the Mini seemed more paranoid with wind warnings than usual. It might have been my imagination, but after watching a Youtube video on IMU calibration I performed such using a bubble level and flat surface. I have never done so since getting the Mini and it seems the Mini complains less often about wind conditions.
I hope to be soon comfortable enough flying so I can start concentrating on some aerial photography.
Thanks again to every contributor on the forum, without your wisdom and experience I would have been Mini-less within the first few days of flying.
PS: DJI Fly has just updated to Ver 1.4.2
Drone flying was on my bucket list of hobbies, I listened, watched and postponed as battery, mini camera and GPS tech evolved, and Chinese craftsmanship improved.
So I saw an ad for 'refurbished' MM's and the price looked right so I took the leap, little knowing what pleasant advanced tech surprise awaited me! I am a big fan of acquiring 'slightly used' toys, my belief being that 'Friday production mistakes' were already sorted out by the previous owner. The 'refurbished' MM is as new, no matter how hard I looked for traces of previous ownership, I could not find any. Sealed, packaged, new battery and warranty as for new, I'll anytime buy a 'refurbished' DJI product again, this way the savings can be put to use for luxury accessories.
My first obstacle to overcome was the mental block of letting expensive toys, be it cameras, microscopes, metal detectors or anything else valuable simply buzz off into the unknown without me maintaining physical contact with it. (The original capital outlay for the MM had by now grown considerably, phone upgrade, memory cards, extra battery to name but a few, most of which will become paperweights if ever the Mini disappears over the horizon.) This here forum to my rescue, the info is all here, and I absorbed it like a sponge. Steep learning curve but its all here.
My main considerations for wanting a spare Mini in the cupboard:
-It's light and compact. (I do a lot of multi day backpack hiking in the most exquisite locations, every extra ounce counts.)
-As for drone tech, the AI complications are kept to a minimum since it's an 'entry level' model. (As a born individualist I prefer doing things manually as far as possible, this force me to understand and appreciate the hardware and operational principles involved.)
-It is relatively inexpensive as hi-tech hobbies go, the amount of hi-tech for money spent is mind boggling compared to a fancy hand held GPS for instance.
-The camera on this 249gram wonder is very acceptable. (I was an aerial photographer during the infamous Angola border war era doing my national service in the South African Air Force. We used Vinten camera pods mounted to aircraft wings shooting 12 inch wide roll film to record visual detail from the air. All while being shot at sometimes. And here I have a 249g UAV with resolution enough to show me my dog’s long lost tennis ball on my house rooftop from 50m up on an image covering almost a whole street block.)
-It uses uncomplicated easy to maintain battery tech. (My cameras all run on Li-ion batteries, never ever let me down and eventual deterioration is predictable.)
I live in a small town here in South Africa, but with a small tower-less airport nearby, mainly used by recreational pilots and they often push the low-flying rules over town during weekends since the river makes for a nice scenic aerial view and the low-flying for a nice show-off to tourists and girlfriends. That was my first concern, so I set out to determine the height of local obstacles like trees, cell towers and church steeples around me. This would determine the minimum alt any pilot would dare to fly at and that also helped determining my minimum RTH alt. I suck at judging height I soon realized; as good as I am at judging distance, (brought upon by shooting and hiking.) I am fortunate to have wide open uninhabited space next to me, so I could practice hand-eye stick co-ordination and RTH maneuvers before setting off too far by sitting on my garage roof for optimum VLOS. With the roof being metal I had to learn to take-off and land from ground level some distance off since the MM compass would certainly be influenced taking off from said metal roof. Gimbal tilted down in C mode does the remote landing trick.
We are forced to do the CE thing here in South Africa so the initial 480m range was a slight let down, knowing that the ‘Mericans can go much further in FCC mode and they do not pay more for their MM’s than us with our weak ZA currency. And we have the wide open spaces here in South Africa. So I set out to improve the range without breaking laws. I first built a pair of temporary parabolic reflectors using a condensed milk tin and a pool noodle. I gained almost 50% in range. Then I fired up my Cantennator App I use for designing radio antennas and built 2.4 GHz yagi’s using Kydex moldable knife sheath material and 3mm aluminum rods I use for pinning on knife handle scales. The yagi’s and reflectors gave me 1500m range at least... I was happy, so I ordered factory made yagi’s and reflectors knowing that it works. I won’t need more that 1500m since I plan to spend flight time doing photography instead of trying to break distance records.
My first long distance test was conducted during a hike last weekend on an escarpment near the Mozambique border, but wind warnings made me high-tail it back long before I ran out of signal.
So far the single biggest challenge flying the MM was wind awareness. I have a Kestrel hand-held weather station from my precision air rifle shooting kit that comes in very handy but wind up there and down on ground level is a different story altogether as everyone cautions. And when there are mountains involved even more so. The AC orientation display in Fly App comes in very handy in observing wind matters while up there. I took the MM in hand while looking at the orientation display, tilted it every which way to see the changes in orientation display and that correlates with the way the Mini battles wind during flight. Once that was understood I knew when to back off or when to push my luck. The golden rule, learnt over and over from this forum is to NEVER fly distance down-wind; you have to battle up-wind back home with low battery levels.
My biggest let-down so far was hiking/climbing 500m into a treacherous gorge with optimistic plans to film a spectacular waterfall from bottom to top with the MM, only to see it default to ATTI mode over water and for the lack of GPS signal and it refused to ascend more than 5m, as per user manual. And then the ‘hand landing’ procedure in ATTI mode resulted in a dual between desperate me to ‘save’ the Mini and a stubborn Mini, the final outcome being me with a sliced finger, bleeding like a pig, and the Mini sitting safe in its carry case with not even a damaged prop. You live, you learn...and climb 500m back up again.
Things I’ve noticed:
Low light capabilities in photo mode exceed that of video mode, reason being that shutter speed in photo mode drop as low as a full second with ISO pushed to 3200, it cannot possibly maintain 25fps video frame rate while exposing for a full second. The stability in hover is mind boggling to produce relatively sharp images at a full second exposure time, NO way it can be done by hand without a tripod, even though we are talking super wide angle lens here.
The extra 20 deg upward gimbal movement (often forgotten) allowed for by enabling ‘Allow Upward Gimbal Rotation’ comes in handy when composing landscapes with lots of sky; I managed nice panoramas of very interesting cirrus cloud formations.
Signal drop-off while using Yagi’s at end of transmission range is much more sudden than with standard antennas, not much warning before it suddenly happens. Yagi’s and parabolic reflectors are by design very directional, good VLOS and a far away landmark used for orientation makes things easier.
I religiously run a screen capture app while flying, this allows me to do a quick review of stupid things I did and system messages I received while hyped up on adrenalin. (I had a case of an ant hitching a ride on my gimbal, I swore UFO until I had a look at the freeze frames of my screen capture. Scary stuff.)
After coming back from my 450km trip to the hiking spot on some rough roads the Mini seemed more paranoid with wind warnings than usual. It might have been my imagination, but after watching a Youtube video on IMU calibration I performed such using a bubble level and flat surface. I have never done so since getting the Mini and it seems the Mini complains less often about wind conditions.
I hope to be soon comfortable enough flying so I can start concentrating on some aerial photography.
Thanks again to every contributor on the forum, without your wisdom and experience I would have been Mini-less within the first few days of flying.
PS: DJI Fly has just updated to Ver 1.4.2
