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Very buggy experience with Air 2S only one day.

Yaros

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Sa Coma, Mallorca
A strange situation happened with my friend's Air 2S and my Air 2 while we were flying together.
Maybe someone can explain why this could have happened.

We both turn on drones, put them on the ground, wait for GPS lock, and try to take off. My drone starts to fly away after takeoff, almost crashed itself into a tree, managed to avoid it and land it. It had GPS lock.
Anyway, restarted it, calibrated the compass (as it was kind of toilet bowling during the flyaway), took off again, seems fine.

Then my friend says he has no GPS lock, but the drone was turned on for about 3 minutes already, I look at his screen, and see something I have never seen before, the GPS icon in the app is red, but the number of satellites is above 20. I told him to re-open the app, he did, the bug disappeared. Thought nothing about it. Then he said to me “it won't let me record”, and again, seems like buggy app, but not really, it doesn't let to switch between photo and video mode even using the controller button, can't start or stop recording, the icon in the app which you click to change between photo and video is grayed out, disabled, as is the photo album icon. Re-opened app, restarted controller, doesn't help. He lands his drone, I keep flying. He restarts the drone and takes off. I start to have issues with my drone as well, signal seems to be dropping randomly and suddenly. And I know that flying close to another drone might create interference, but we have flown our two drones at the same time before, and yes, worse signal then flying alone, but not as bad as it was now.

Then, he tries to do a Mastershot with the Air 2S, it starts the mastershot but cuts it at 50% with a couple of motor errors. What?? And again, the app locks up in a way that you can't change shooting mode, won't let do anything. We both land our drones to switch batteries.

After we do, the most bizarre thing I ever have experienced with a DJI drone happens.
He takes off with the Air 2S, hovers at about 50 meters, while my Air 2 is on the ground searching for satellites. Here's when on his screen, the telemetry and video feed abruptly switches to my drone, for about half a second, then goes back, what? Makes no sense at all!

Then I take off, my drone seems to be fine, we both start a hyperlapse, and here's when more problems with the Air 2S appear. The screen goes black, well, the live feed, the telemetry is visible, some of it updating (like battery levels, height, distance) and some of it frozen (map, estimated remaining flight time...), tried to restart app, nothing, restarted controller, nothing, it is definitely connected to the drone, the lights on the remote aren't blinking, but the app doesn't seem to work. We used RTH to return the drone, and land it visually.

Mine seems to work but again has poor signal…

I don't know what happened that day but the drone flown okay since that day.

My Air 2 has almost 3000 km of flight distance, the Air 2S has about 1200 km, neither of the drones have had major issues before this flight, everything went very smooth, until this...
I don't understand how and why this happened, hopefully it will not happen again.
Something to note, maybe it is a known bug or something: The phone that was used for flying the Air 2S had its android language changed in settings from English to Ukrainian, but I won't think that such a change would bring so many glitches…

Sorry, I don't have logs from Air 2S to attach, because the drone is not mine, but I don't think anything interesting is recorded in them anyway.
 
Mentioning firmware and fly app versions will help get ideas I believe. Refreshing everything via Assistant 2 with reinstalling the latest fly app would be my first step toward ruling out the possible issues.
 
A strange situation happened with my friend's Air 2S and my Air 2 while we were flying together.
Maybe someone can explain why this could have happened.

We both turn on drones, put them on the ground, wait for GPS lock, and try to take off. My drone starts to fly away after takeoff, almost crashed itself into a tree, managed to avoid it and land it. It had GPS lock.
Anyway, restarted it, calibrated the compass (as it was kind of toilet bowling during the flyaway), took off again, seems fine.

Then my friend says he has no GPS lock, but the drone was turned on for about 3 minutes already, I look at his screen, and see something I have never seen before, the GPS icon in the app is red, but the number of satellites is above 20. I told him to re-open the app, he did, the bug disappeared. Thought nothing about it. Then he said to me “it won't let me record”, and again, seems like buggy app, but not really, it doesn't let to switch between photo and video mode even using the controller button, can't start or stop recording, the icon in the app which you click to change between photo and video is grayed out, disabled, as is the photo album icon. Re-opened app, restarted controller, doesn't help. He lands his drone, I keep flying. He restarts the drone and takes off. I start to have issues with my drone as well, signal seems to be dropping randomly and suddenly. And I know that flying close to another drone might create interference, but we have flown our two drones at the same time before, and yes, worse signal then flying alone, but not as bad as it was now.

Then, he tries to do a Mastershot with the Air 2S, it starts the mastershot but cuts it at 50% with a couple of motor errors. What?? And again, the app locks up in a way that you can't change shooting mode, won't let do anything. We both land our drones to switch batteries.

After we do, the most bizarre thing I ever have experienced with a DJI drone happens.
He takes off with the Air 2S, hovers at about 50 meters, while my Air 2 is on the ground searching for satellites. Here's when on his screen, the telemetry and video feed abruptly switches to my drone, for about half a second, then goes back, what? Makes no sense at all!

Then I take off, my drone seems to be fine, we both start a hyperlapse, and here's when more problems with the Air 2S appear. The screen goes black, well, the live feed, the telemetry is visible, some of it updating (like battery levels, height, distance) and some of it frozen (map, estimated remaining flight time...), tried to restart app, nothing, restarted controller, nothing, it is definitely connected to the drone, the lights on the remote aren't blinking, but the app doesn't seem to work. We used RTH to return the drone, and land it visually.

Mine seems to work but again has poor signal…

I don't know what happened that day but the drone flown okay since that day.

My Air 2 has almost 3000 km of flight distance, the Air 2S has about 1200 km, neither of the drones have had major issues before this flight, everything went very smooth, until this...
I don't understand how and why this happened, hopefully it will not happen again.
Something to note, maybe it is a known bug or something: The phone that was used for flying the Air 2S had its android language changed in settings from English to Ukrainian, but I won't think that such a change would bring so many glitches…

Sorry, I don't have logs from Air 2S to attach, because the drone is not mine, but I don't think anything interesting is recorded in them anyway.
try Litchi ap, I only fly VR with goggles with it , no problems
 
try Litchi ap, I only fly VR with goggles with it , no problems
I do have Litchi app, but do not use it much.
Usually DJI Fly works without issues, but this time was different, I guess.
 
Have you flown close to him before without problems? It sounds like transmitter frequency interference. If it happens again, try turning one controller off. Maybe put them manually on different frequencies.
 
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Have you flown close to him before without problems?
Yes, many times. We fly together almost every weekend, no problems until that day.
 
Yes, many times. We fly together almost every weekend, no problems until that day.
I know this will sound funny, but were there other people nearby flying? Sometimes three or more transmitters being used can create harmonic frequencies that will mess everyone up. It happens in the RC car and fixedwing community a lot, or used to.
 
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I know this will sound funny, but were there other people nearby flying? Sometimes three or more transmitters being used can create harmonic frequencies that will mess everyone up. It happens in the RC car and fixedwing community a lot, or used to.
Very unlikely. In the area where we were flying, only us two and another guy I know fly drones, especially in the winter there aren't other people here flying drones except us. And to have interference the other drone or remote had to be so close that we would hear it or see it at least.

However, it might have been another thing causing interference, I'm not sure. It is definitely not the first time we were flying there, and we didn't have any interference prior to this day.

Actually, I had issues with my gimbal on the drone tilting if I would fly in a specific place in a specific time of the day, that was a while back, and it wasn't in this place either, but because of that I know that interference is possible, but it causing the app to glitch or to receive motor errors is pretty uncommon.
 
A ton of stuff uses the 2.5-5Mhz spectrum, including GPS. While this usually isn't a problem, being close to a powerful transmitter in this range can completely wipe out GPS reception, and anything else if your receiver is near the transmitter.

I have no idea if this is what happened, but if you were in an urban locale the chances are much higher.
 
One thing you can try is one of you lock your frequencies to the 2 ghz and one to the 5 ghz. This may take care of your problems.
 
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