New Mini 5 Pro owner with concerns

[heimao88]

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for advice because I experienced a very scary issue today with my new DJI Mini 5 Pro. I bought it just this week and today was my first real flight with it.

I was flying in a park with a small lagoon and, out of nowhere, the drone suddenly lost all satellites. It immediately switched into Attitude (ATTI) mode, turned red in the status bar, and began drifting very quickly and uncontrollably. I had to fight the sticks just to keep it in the air and prevent it from flying away.

After about a minute, it finally regained satellites and stabilized, and I landed it right away.

This has never happened to me with my previous drones , Mini 3 Pro (Except for when it suddenly fell out of the sky), Spark, and Flip, even in areas with more people and more interference. In this case there were very few people around, and the location didn’t seem to have any obvious interference sources.

This sudden loss of GNSS on a brand-new drone is really concerning, so I’m hoping someone can help analyze what might have caused it. I’ve already extracted the flight logs and will upload them here.

Any advice, insights, or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

Flight Record:

DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com

 

[Lykus]

Welcome to the forum!

 

[MA2 317]

Hello from the Crossroads of America heimao88.

Nice to meet you.

Help may be along soon and you already posted the flight log so that's a start.

Welcome to the Forum.

.

 

[UAVquadman]

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for advice because I experienced a very scary issue today with my new DJI Mini 5 Pro. I bought it just this week and today was my first real flight with it.

I was flying in a park with a small lagoon and, out of nowhere, the drone suddenly lost all satellites. It immediately switched into Attitude (ATTI) mode, turned red in the status bar, and began drifting very quickly and uncontrollably. I had to fight the sticks just to keep it in the air and prevent it from flying away.

After about a minute, it finally regained satellites and stabilized, and I landed it right away.

This has never happened to me with my previous drones , Mini 3 Pro (Except for when it suddenly fell out of the sky), Spark, and Flip, even in areas with more people and more interference. In this case there were very few people around, and the location didn’t seem to have any obvious interference sources.

This sudden loss of GNSS on a brand-new drone is really concerning, so I’m hoping someone can help analyze what might have caused it. I’ve already extracted the flight logs and will upload them here.

Any advice, insights, or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

Flight Record:

DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com

see if this happens again. And they don't fly away by losing GNSS unless there are other issues.

 

[DoomMeister]

see if this happens again. And they don't fly away by losing GNSS unless there are other issues.

They don’t fly away, but they do drift with the wind. There is no dynamic braking when the sticks are released and return to center. The laws of inertia govern the flight. The only flight assistance is from the barometer helping to maintain altitude.

If it has been awhile since the drone has been used it can take up to 12 minutes to fully update the almanac for GPS.

Quote from OP: “I had to fight the sticks just to keep it in the air and prevent it from flying away.”

If you experience Atti mode in the future yaw the aircraft to face into the prevailing wind and then use right stick forward to counteract the wind and prevent drifting. Remember that with GPS not working any control inputs will require a bit of the opposite control to stop movement in that direction. Releasing the stick does not stop the inertia as when GPS is stabilizing the aircraft.

 

[Daniel NZDF]

Welcome to the forum!

 

[AeroJ]

I have never had a complete, sudden loss of GPS with my mini (4P). In fact once I gain them I don't think I ever noticed losing any more than 1 or 2... so I wonder what caused that ? We have had several days of unusually high KP Index, up in the 7's but the overall consensus is that we don't need to care about that, right ?

 

[UAVquadman]

They don’t fly away, but they do drift with the wind. There is no dynamic braking when the sticks are released and return to center. The laws of inertia govern the flight. The only flight assistance is from the barometer helping to maintain altitude.

If it has been awhile since the drone has been used it can take up to 12 minutes to fully update the almanac for GPS.

Quote from OP: “I had to fight the sticks just to keep it in the air and prevent it from flying away.”

If you experience Atti mode in the future yaw the aircraft to face into the prevailing wind and then use right stick forward to counteract the wind and prevent drifting. Remember that with GPS not working any control inputs will require a bit of the opposite control to stop movement in that direction. Releasing the stick does not stop the inertia as when GPS is stabilizing the aircraft.

thank you for making this clear. I thought about getting a Mini 5 Pro but don't see myself flying it much, but I do like the vertical tilt doesn't have the issue the Mavic 4 Pro has.

 

[LoudThunder]

Any advice, insights, or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Since you live in the Philippines and you probably did not buy your drone off the black or gray market and therefore it is covered by DJI's warranty… so not to worry unless you intend to fly it again over water… then you had better have the Care Refresh.

I would tell you to concentrate on flying it only over land in an open area, no trees, no buildings, etc… then, since you are a beginner, with no real flying skills, if the drone does do this again, just land it and go retrieve it and send it back for warranty work…

It has been my experience that folks who start out with a GPS drone, all too often depend on the video feed to fly their drone back home after they get it out of sight or use Return to Home… But when you lose GPS, Return to Home does not work since the drone no longer knows where home is located.

You really are lucky, there are a couple of other members who lost their drones on their first flights… One put their brand new Mini 4 Pro into their neighbor's tree and that is where it stays… The other managed to fly their brand new Mavic 4 Pro into their garage wall... they bought it on the gray market from Canada and sent it back from the US to Canada for repair. After it was repaired, DJI sent it back but it was intercepted by US Customs and that is where it remains to this day…

 

[Felix le Chat]

As a 'newbie': the first time you encounter a forced drop into 'ATTI' mode, you will have panicked and over-compensated with the sticks, inadvertantly creating most of the problems you experienced, this isn't something new. A lot of new drone fliers find the same.

There may be a number of reasons you might have lost GPS (satellite) reception. The KP Index can be part of this, this phenomenon can cause attenuation between the drone and the link with the satellite cluster - effectively dropping connection with a significant number of sats (based on the strength of the KP interference - the higher the KP: the more sats you potentially lose). The last few days have featured quite a significant solar storm which has sent the KP Index up to an 8+, which is classed as a 'severe solar event'.

Other factors include yaw errors instigated by unexpected magnetic interference, EMI from badly shielded sources, or plain old WiFi interference attenuating the control signal.

Another increasing problem we all face is deliberate GPS jamming, something which is becoming frighteningly regular in my own neck of the woods (the United Kingdom) where bloody football clubs have been using jammers to make sure that all footage shot of the match has been 'officially' paid for.

 

[LoudThunder]

There may be a number of reasons you might have lost GPS (satellite) reception. The KP Index can be part of this,

I've noticed that my Garmin GPS has been acting flakey, sometimes freezing up and having to shut it down to restart and sometimes it still cannot find any satellites...

 

[Felix le Chat]

I've noticed that my Garmin GPS has been acting flakey, sometimes freezing up and having to shut it down to restart and sometimes it still cannot find any satellites...

That sounds more like GPS jamming. First time I noticed it was during a long drive back from a gig in Wales, everything fine & dandy, until the "...take the next left..." voice prompts started to send me on a Magical Mystery Tour - then the map was blank and it became old school navigation.

Had problems setting a new destination the next morning, trawling through the settings, I found that it had decided that I lived in Lichtenstein.

The UK Midlands, Wales and the whole Southwest coast are currently three massive GPS jamming areas and will be for the next week. I suppose I should write a 'thank you' note to uncle Vlad.

 

[Meta4]

I have never had a complete, sudden loss of GPS with my mini (4P). In fact once I gain them I don't think I ever noticed losing any more than 1 or 2... so I wonder what caused that ? We have had several days of unusually high KP Index, up in the 7's but the overall consensus is that we don't need to care about that, right ?

There may be a number of reasons you might have lost GPS (satellite) reception. The KP Index can be part of this, this phenomenon can cause attenuation between the drone and the link with the satellite cluster - effectively dropping connection with a significant number of sats (based on the strength of the KP interference - the higher the KP: the more sats you potentially lose). The last few days have featured quite a significant solar storm which has sent the KP Index up to an 8+, which is classed as a 'severe solar event'.

Despite the number of times people say this, high Kp has no noticeable effect on DJI drones.
I've been purposely flying in every high Kp event I can and last week flew in Kp 9 and everything was completely normal.
The number of sats was 31-32 for the whole flight.
An old Garmin handheld also worked normally too.

Another increasing problem we all face is deliberate GPS jamming, something which is becoming frighteningly regular in my own neck of the woods (the United Kingdom) where bloody football clubs have been using jammers to make sure that all footage shot of the match has been 'officially' paid for.

The way his GPS issue shows in his flight data , it was either a problem with his hardware or local GPS jamming.

 

[Kendallfordguy]

Welcome from Wisconsin!

 

[careless]

Welcome from Kentucky

 

[a2tomm]

never in 7 years of dji drones have i had satellite loss problems until this month NOV 2025 ,doing the research I find SOLAR storms are overly active ,my new fleet member the mini 5 handled the 3 satellite loss problems

 

[Laborous]

Welcome to the forum from the beautiful woods of Maine!
I have never experienced this with any of my drones so the only advice I have is to fly over land and see if this happens again. If it does, use the warranty.
Fly safe, enjoy and stay safe!

 

[AeroJ]

Yeah just checked out dronescene and there's a few vast NOTAMs around the place at the moment - I am lucky to be just outside one, but you have to wonder how safe I am - it's not like the jamming completely stops at the border is it ?!

Surprised they can get away with whole weeks worth of periodic jamming when so many other GPS devices surely depend on that not happening - sat nav / phones / cameras etc...

Ah well - guess they are expecting terrorism to be more drone-based in the future, so can't blame them for wanting to know GPS denial of service systems work in advance... all well and good of course, unless your bombers are FPV pilots relatively close by to target who presumably wouldn't give a rat's bottom if GPS was there or not...

For that reason at some point presumably they will have to test control signal blocking stuff as well, which is rather more of a worry, and presumably results in RED NOTAMS rather than yellow ones ?!

 

[PakNheat380]

Welcome to the forum from NW Montana

 

[GFields]

Greetings from Birmingham Alabama USA: welcome to the forum! We look forward to hearing from you!