My turn to lose mavic pro

[Rifleair]

Today it was my turn to lose my pro, i lost connection and could not see it, after trying to regain the app without success I tried to fly it home the distance was going away and counting up towards 400m.
initially it did not respond to input but then it did and started counting down, phew, got to 235m and started going up again so i carried on trying left, right , back and forward until it started counting down again this happened 3 or 4 times with the closest coming to 82 metres but no visual or sound, then battery warning kicked in and it said returning home, except it didn't come to me, nor did it go to the last site i flew from. now i don't know what to do, the find my drone shows where I lost connection but with the toing and froing i have no idea in which direction to start looking. the final distance from controller was 697m
@sar104 can you help, also I cannot find where the flight log is to be found

hopeful thanks in anticipation

 

[sar104]

Even though they will be incomplete, the place to start is with the mobile device DAT file and txt log. Instructions for retrieving those are in the links below:

How to retrieve a V3.DAT from the tablet

DJI Flight Log Viewer

 

[Rifleair]

Even though they will be incomplete, the place to start is with the mobile device DAT file and txt log. Instructions for retrieving those are in the links below:

How to retrieve a V3.DAT from the tablet

DJI Flight Log Viewer

Here is the flight log, i can see the dat file but the computer says wrong extension?

 

[sar104]

Here is the flight log, i can see the dat file but the computer says wrong extension?

Yes - you will need to change the DAT file extension to .txt to upload it here, or you could upload it to Dropbox and post the link.

 

[Rifleair]

Dropbox - 18-06-10-01-19-09_FLY018.DAT
here is a dropbox link to the .dat file

Thanks for helping

 

[sar104]

OK - unfortunately this is problematic. You mentioned that you controlled the aircraft for some considerable time after the app quit (that would have been over 10 minutes based on the battery depletion rate) during which time there are no location data for the aircraft - only your recollection of distance.



One can make a few educated guesses. For example, if it returned to within 82 m but you did not see or hear it, then it was probably the other side of the trees to the west. If it subsequently moved away then that was likely also on the west side. But it should have attempted to RTH with sufficient battery to get home, so it is odd that it neither reconnected nor made it home.

Assuming that it did commence RTH then it must have ended up closer than the maximum 697 m distance that you saw, which would put it within the larger red circle. That's much too large an area to be useful unfortunately. There is a power line running NE - SW just NW of your position - it's possible that it got in the way of the return path, but now I'm completely speculating.

One question - when you lost the app and were trying to bring it back, why didn't you just hit the RTH button on the RC?

 

[Rifleair]

This is my tale of woe,
After dithering for far too long trying to get the phone reconnected I did press rth, however when I saw the distance increasing instead of decreasing I cancelled it and tried to fly it home, What I think I was doing was this;
It was a very bright day and the screen view was difficult even though I had a sunhood on, my last action before losing control was to turn back towards me following the tree line along the road,so I believed that it was flying straight towards me, but looking at the txt file map I can see that I was heading along a different tree line, and it was heading away obliquely from me.
At the time I could not work out what was happening when I got the distance to decrease and it got to 282m where it started to increase again without coming into view, I thought that if it was decreasing then obviously it was coming straight back towards me (Duh) looking at the track and with the benefit of hindsight it seems fairly clear that it must have been backtracking its own course so it would count down but only until it came back above the mill then it would have gone further away again, so when I saw this I tried to fly it left and right to get the distance decreasing again which happened as it came to within 82 metres, at this point when it started to go up again I think I lost all sanity and could have started shouting at the controller for being a lying piece of ****, that didn't work so I tried rth again, still no joy, so I think that with my backing and forwarding along the last seen track it would have been going over the power lines several times so is it possible that enough crossings could have screwed it up sufficiently so as to lose the home point? I don't know but when it got to low enough battery to rth automatically it just got further away.
So I believe that it is in the bottom half of the larger circle which as you can see contains a river covered in trees, a canal covered in trees and several fields waist high in crops, time to go hiking!

 

[sar104]

This is my tale of woe,
After dithering for far too long trying to get the phone reconnected I did press rth, however when I saw the distance increasing instead of decreasing I cancelled it and tried to fly it home, What I think I was doing was this;
It was a very bright day and the screen view was difficult even though I had a sunhood on, my last action before losing control was to turn back towards me following the tree line along the road,so I believed that it was flying straight towards me, but looking at the txt file map I can see that I was heading along a different tree line, and it was heading away obliquely from me.
At the time I could not work out what was happening when I got the distance to decrease and it got to 282m where it started to increase again without coming into view, I thought that if it was decreasing then obviously it was coming straight back towards me (Duh) looking at the track and with the benefit of hindsight it seems fairly clear that it must have been backtracking its own course so it would count down but only until it came back above the mill then it would have gone further away again, so when I saw this I tried to fly it left and right to get the distance decreasing again which happened as it came to within 82 metres, at this point when it started to go up again I think I lost all sanity and could have started shouting at the controller for being a lying piece of ****, that didn't work so I tried rth again, still no joy, so I think that with my backing and forwarding along the last seen track it would have been going over the power lines several times so is it possible that enough crossings could have screwed it up sufficiently so as to lose the home point? I don't know but when it got to low enough battery to rth automatically it just got further away.
So I believe that it is in the bottom half of the larger circle which as you can see contains a river covered in trees, a canal covered in trees and several fields waist high in crops, time to go hiking!

It's not likely to have lost its homepoint - that would take a deliberate reset from the app. I don't know why it would have moved further away in RTH. It was not nearly windy enough (5 - 10 mph out of the NE) to prevent RTH in any direction.

 

[Rifleair]

Indeed, that's what threw me, when it was turned on, the map showed exactly where I was, the compass was aligned, it flew fine until I lost connection, perhaps I dithered a bit trying to regain connection but when it dawned on me to fly it home is when it all went wrong, the first thing I did was to press RTH, and when it just carried on gaining distance I cancelled and tried to fly by putting in rear right which seemed to work,then it went tits up and I could not understand what it was doing, so now I guess its just keep looking, but, I would just like to thank you for your assistance, cheers

 

[roadkill443]

Relatively local to me, did you have any luck finding it?
You've mentioned the bright sun, if that was behind you there's a chance the obstacle avoidance could have picked it up as it turned to return to home. Would explain the increase in distance if it was backing away from it.

 

[Trickydicky]

Today it was my turn to lose my pro, i lost connection and could not see it, after trying to regain the app without success I tried to fly it home the distance was going away and counting up towards 400m.
initially it did not respond to input but then it did and started counting down, phew, got to 235m and started going up again so i carried on trying left, right , back and forward until it started counting down again this happened 3 or 4 times with the closest coming to 82 metres but no visual or sound, then battery warning kicked in and it said returning home, except it didn't come to me, nor did it go to the last site i flew from. now i don't know what to do, the find my drone shows where I lost connection but with the toing and froing i have no idea in which direction to start looking. the final distance from controller was 697m
@sar104 can you help, also I cannot find where the flight log is to be found

hopeful thanks in anticipation

What did DJI have to say about your drone flying away. Surely if you lost connection the drone should have returned home. Was the drone faulty?