So let me preface this one by saying right up front, I intentionally let my Mavic fly out of VLOS. Now before someone in a glass house starts casting stones, let me say that I did not do it without doing a risk assessment and putting together a plan for the flight. As I have said several times on the forum I live less than 4 miles off the end of the runway at a small non towered regional jetport, so every time I fly here I do a whole pre flight routine, checking notams at the airport, using Flight Tracker to see if there is any traffic in the area I need to be aware of. I notify the airport as required (we have a system worked out and I just send an email to them to which they repy back very quickly).
I wanted to try out a long waypoint mission on Litchi so I built one that would take it from my house over to an abandoned rock quarry. I kept the altitude from the house over to the quarry under 200 agl. Once on station there is an abandoned service building that I had set as a POI and I had the MP drop down to 60 agl and do one orbit around the building. Once complete it would fly back up to 200 agl and then make the return trip home. Total roundtrip distance was 2.4 miles and the total mission time was estimated at 18 minutes.
Between my house and extending beyond the mission POI there is 3 miles of nothing but woods and old lakes left over from the gravel operations. SO the risk in the flight was minimal as the worse that could happen was I lose the MP in the water or deep in the woods.
Everything set and I started the mission. At 2:15 in, it reaches the first waypoint and begins the descent. Right away the gimbal starts doing some twitching before it finally settles on the POI. Then it happens! As it drops down to 60 agl I get the dreaded SIGNAL LOSS! The video was splotchy for about 15 seconds and then the screen froze. No video, no telemetry, no signal! Which I was ok until the 3 minute mark and then when nothing happened, no hint of signal, no stutter in the video, no nothing, I started to get worried. I tried standing on top of something, repositioning the controller, hit the return to home button about three times (to which I got a notice from Litchi that it had failed due to signal loss.) Six whole long minutes, the same amount of time for ionization blackouts on an Apollo mission reentry. Talk about one nervous nelly.
I was already gathering things up to get in the car and drive over there when the signal meter started to flicker and the video started to pixilize back in. The gimbal was making some very eratic movement, but it finally settled and it started the journey back home. Mission complete! Lessons learned? Of course there were lessons learned, and next time I try it I won't drop down as low as I did and I will speed up the orbit a little so it doesn't linger on station quite as long. All in all though it was a success and weather permitting tomorrow I may try it again and head over to some of the old control towers at the strainer.
I wanted to try out a long waypoint mission on Litchi so I built one that would take it from my house over to an abandoned rock quarry. I kept the altitude from the house over to the quarry under 200 agl. Once on station there is an abandoned service building that I had set as a POI and I had the MP drop down to 60 agl and do one orbit around the building. Once complete it would fly back up to 200 agl and then make the return trip home. Total roundtrip distance was 2.4 miles and the total mission time was estimated at 18 minutes.
Between my house and extending beyond the mission POI there is 3 miles of nothing but woods and old lakes left over from the gravel operations. SO the risk in the flight was minimal as the worse that could happen was I lose the MP in the water or deep in the woods.
Everything set and I started the mission. At 2:15 in, it reaches the first waypoint and begins the descent. Right away the gimbal starts doing some twitching before it finally settles on the POI. Then it happens! As it drops down to 60 agl I get the dreaded SIGNAL LOSS! The video was splotchy for about 15 seconds and then the screen froze. No video, no telemetry, no signal! Which I was ok until the 3 minute mark and then when nothing happened, no hint of signal, no stutter in the video, no nothing, I started to get worried. I tried standing on top of something, repositioning the controller, hit the return to home button about three times (to which I got a notice from Litchi that it had failed due to signal loss.) Six whole long minutes, the same amount of time for ionization blackouts on an Apollo mission reentry. Talk about one nervous nelly.
I was already gathering things up to get in the car and drive over there when the signal meter started to flicker and the video started to pixilize back in. The gimbal was making some very eratic movement, but it finally settled and it started the journey back home. Mission complete! Lessons learned? Of course there were lessons learned, and next time I try it I won't drop down as low as I did and I will speed up the orbit a little so it doesn't linger on station quite as long. All in all though it was a success and weather permitting tomorrow I may try it again and head over to some of the old control towers at the strainer.
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