I received my M2 last week and due to the terrible weather have had few opportunities to fly it. This is my 4th DJI drone so I'm pretty familiar with the whole (often frustrating) DJI ecosystem. Before anything else, I did the usual updating of the software and here was the first sign of trouble. Right off the bat, the DJI Go 4 software demanded that I bind the transmitter to the drone. This has never occurred before as all my previous quads came already bound. Nevertheless, I bound it and had to wait until this past Tuesday to actually fly. Before the flight, even though it didn't ask for it, I calibrated the compass and up to this point everything seemed normal. I should mention too that I had previously bound my white DJI goggles to the drone without incident.
First flight, I get about 300 yards away (direct line of sight) and lose signal. The drone goes into RTH and does just that with me trying to reconnect the entire way. When it's about 20 feet over head and landing itself, I finally get control---although the app is still grayed out---and land it. I shut everything down and upon restarting, it demands to be rebound again, which I do. I take off again, go to almost exactly the same distance and a repeat of the first flight occurs. I then spend about 10 minutes with it on the ground trying different things like trying to re-update the firmware, etc. Finally, at some random point, I get a pop-up on the app saying there's a firmware mismatch and asking me if I'd like to correct it; which of course I do.
I have time for one more brief flight and everything appears normal although I never get much further than 300-400 yards away. The weather grounds me until yesterday (Friday) but I use the time to look at the flight logs on Airdata. The first flight shows extremely poor signal strength before I'm even 20 yards away. The 2nd aborted flight doesn't show signal errors but, shows up as 2 different partial flights along the same route (weird). The 3rd one looked pretty normal. So, yesterday I take it out and get out to about 1,000 feet still with direct line of sight. I'm using the goggles and realize my phone is beeping at me and look to see that it says disconnected, RTH. I look back through goggles and see clearly that it's returning to home although I have no control over it. I close and restart the app and it again wants me to rebind at which point I give up on it. Meanwhile, and I think tellingly, the goggles never lose connection and I can follow the entire flight back with them.
I'm loathe to send the thing back but, at this point, I don't trust this drone and likely never will. The Airdata flight log on the last flight shows all normal on the outbound leg and then nothing. It also shows a separate flight of about 50 feet with a false homepoint along it.
Sorry for the length of this but, I thought I'd throw this out to the community since my experience seems to be unique and as best I can tell, I just got a lemon unless someone has better ideas. I'm very reluctant to even try again since at this point the quad's undamaged and the fact that flight data shows random new homepoints on the aborted flights, I suspect I risk a flyaway. The bad news is it'll probably take 2-3 weeks, best case scenario, to get a new one in my hands. The good news is I ordered from B&H who I believe will be much easier to deal with than DJI.
First flight, I get about 300 yards away (direct line of sight) and lose signal. The drone goes into RTH and does just that with me trying to reconnect the entire way. When it's about 20 feet over head and landing itself, I finally get control---although the app is still grayed out---and land it. I shut everything down and upon restarting, it demands to be rebound again, which I do. I take off again, go to almost exactly the same distance and a repeat of the first flight occurs. I then spend about 10 minutes with it on the ground trying different things like trying to re-update the firmware, etc. Finally, at some random point, I get a pop-up on the app saying there's a firmware mismatch and asking me if I'd like to correct it; which of course I do.
I have time for one more brief flight and everything appears normal although I never get much further than 300-400 yards away. The weather grounds me until yesterday (Friday) but I use the time to look at the flight logs on Airdata. The first flight shows extremely poor signal strength before I'm even 20 yards away. The 2nd aborted flight doesn't show signal errors but, shows up as 2 different partial flights along the same route (weird). The 3rd one looked pretty normal. So, yesterday I take it out and get out to about 1,000 feet still with direct line of sight. I'm using the goggles and realize my phone is beeping at me and look to see that it says disconnected, RTH. I look back through goggles and see clearly that it's returning to home although I have no control over it. I close and restart the app and it again wants me to rebind at which point I give up on it. Meanwhile, and I think tellingly, the goggles never lose connection and I can follow the entire flight back with them.
I'm loathe to send the thing back but, at this point, I don't trust this drone and likely never will. The Airdata flight log on the last flight shows all normal on the outbound leg and then nothing. It also shows a separate flight of about 50 feet with a false homepoint along it.
Sorry for the length of this but, I thought I'd throw this out to the community since my experience seems to be unique and as best I can tell, I just got a lemon unless someone has better ideas. I'm very reluctant to even try again since at this point the quad's undamaged and the fact that flight data shows random new homepoints on the aborted flights, I suspect I risk a flyaway. The bad news is it'll probably take 2-3 weeks, best case scenario, to get a new one in my hands. The good news is I ordered from B&H who I believe will be much easier to deal with than DJI.
