Windspeed and altitude

[iam4k33m]

How high do you feel comfortable sending your mini 1 with regards to altitude? How much wind would you say is too much?

 

[MAvic_South_Oz]

..
The Fly app should have a little attitude display, shows how the drone is tilting.

It is kind of like the attitude bowl on the Go4 app my drones use, and shows how the drone tilts with wind from any direction.
To me, it's the definitive method of telling how your drone is handling winds at whatever altitude you are flying at.

Get to know how the display is showing the drones tilt to cope with the wind, and use that as you climb.
When flying up to 120m AGL, or in areas of winds changes, gusts, around terrain etc, I will stop and watch the bowl for a second, see how much the drone is tilting to resist the wind.

Be very careful with the Mini, it has the lowest wind resistance of all the DJI drones.
Level 4 - 8m/s, or 28km/h.

It also uses a 2s Li-ion battery, which can have power delivery issues when under stress (in sports mode, resisting wind, climbing a lot, etc).

There are some pretty good apps that might help get a rough idea of forecasted wind speed at altitude.
UAV forecast shows 10m, 50m 100m and up.
Ventusky (web or small cost app) shows great info, wind at 10m, 100m, and up, plus gusts, rain coud cover, temps, and so on.

edit typo

 

[old man mavic]

@iam4k33m ,unfortunately the MM was not a very capable flyer in windy conditions ,and most of its shortcomings were alleviated with the advent of the mini 2, it also struggled to make any sort of progress into the wind at quite low altitudes, especially if a sudden gust of wind hit it ,during my time with the MM i didnt like going much above 200ft altitude ,unless it was a really calm windless day that we sometimes get in the summer ,to be fair it was DJI s first attempt at a sub 250g drone ,and was at the time of its release ,far superior to what was on the market at the time from competitors, i found it a great little drone for low down work and for not going to far from the home point

 

[Phantomrain.org]

This might give you and Idea , with this drone , because of the lack of power you have to be more carefull and I would keep it to 100 ft because of this.

Phantomrain.org
Gear to fly in the Rain. Land on the Water.

 

[iam4k33m]

This might give you and Idea , with this drone , because of the lack of power you have to be more carefull and I would keep it to 100 ft because of this.

Phantomrain.org
Gear to fly in the Rain. Land on the Water.

View attachment 162382

Yeah that's about where I tend to fly at the high end, 30m, usually closer to 20 - 25m (65 - 80ft)

 

[iam4k33m]

@iam4k33m ,unfortunately the MM was not a very capable flyer in windy conditions ,and most of its shortcomings were alleviated with the advent of the mini 2, it also struggled to make any sort of progress into the wind at quite low altitudes, especially if a sudden gust of wind hit it ,during my time with the MM i didnt like going much above 200ft altitude ,unless it was a really calm windless day that we sometimes get in the summer ,to be fair it was DJI s first attempt at a sub 250g drone ,and was at the time of its release ,far superior to what was on the market at the time from competitors, i found it a great little drone for low down work and for not going to far from the home point

Right now I'm usually around 8m (25ft) on a breezy day, but when the air is still it's more like 30m (100ft) for me right now.
Didn't know about the radar view till recently! Gonna have to get a feel for the artificial horizon display for sure.

 

[Yorkshire_Pud]

Bear in mind you are legally limited to within 400ft of the earth's surface and in most places that translates to approximately 400ft above the ground directly beneath the drone.
An accidentally set RTH height ( which is once reason why I hate the sliding adjusters in fly ) sent my Mavic Mini up to more than twice that over the sea during a failsafe RTH. It takes a very long time to get it down from there, all of it with me 'clenching' very hard. At the time I didn't know how to stop an RTH climb to height.
I had previously flown it up a cliff so the max height setting was high. I was very lucky, if there had been wind up there it would have been going for a deep sea dive.
Across all my outdoor mini flights my average maximum height reached is 36.5m, the average average-height is 15.8m.
For the mini 2 those numbers are 52.5m and 24.6m respectively
For the Mavic 2, 34.1m and 15.7m. lol
Guess you could call me a ground hugger but I see no point in going high unless there is a reason for it.

 

[rwilliam99]

Bear in mind you are legally limited to within 400ft of the earth's surface and in most places that translates to approximately 400ft above the ground directly beneath the drone.
An accidentally set RTH height ( which is once reason why I hate the sliding adjusters in fly ) sent my Mavic Mini up to more than twice that over the sea during a failsafe RTH. It takes a very long time to get it down from there, all of it with me 'clenching' very hard. At the time I didn't know how to stop an RTH climb to height.
I had previously flown it up a cliff so the max height setting was high. I was very lucky, if there had been wind up there it would have been going for a deep sea dive.
Across all my outdoor mini flights my average maximum height reached is 36.5m, the average average-height is 15.8m.
For the mini 2 those numbers are 52.5m and 24.6m respectively
For the Mavic 2, 34.1m and 15.7m. lol
Guess you could call me a ground hugger but I see no point in going high unless there is a reason for it.

Count me as a ground hugger as well.

Question for you - how did you compile those average height stats?

 

[Yorkshire_Pud]

I have a program that scans the csv's of all my flight logs and does various things with the data. It summarises each log into one line in an output csv.
I used Excel's average function in that csv to produce the averages of the max-height column and the average height column that were quoted in the post above.
The program is based on a thread in here from a couple? of years ago.
Unfortunately it uses Linux and the Gawk programming 'language', my programming would be considered very crude programming by pros lol so it's not to everyone's taste. 3600+ csv's containing near 6 million lines.
I tend to find bugs when I happen to notice odd data in the output csv.
It's also rather 'fragile' as it depends on the csv's using certain names for the columns that I am interested in.
The program gets altered to include any 'new' data that I happen to think might be interesting.

 

[rwilliam99]

I have a program that scans the csv's of all my flight logs and does various things with the data. It summarises each log into one line in an output csv.
I used Excel's average function in that csv to produce the averages of the max-height column and the average height column that were quoted in the post above.
The program is based on a thread in here from a couple? of years ago.
Unfortunately it uses Linux and the Gawk programming 'language', my programming would be considered very crude programming by pros lol so it's not to everyone's taste. 3600+ csv's containing near 6 million lines.
I tend to find bugs when I happen to notice odd data in the output csv.
It's also rather 'fragile' as it depends on the csv's using certain names for the columns that I am interested in.
The program gets altered to include any 'new' data that I happen to think might be interesting.

Thanks for the info - I understand. I'm a programmer by trade and I've developed things for only my own use the same way. I don't feel like investing the time to make them bulletproof, just good enough to do what I want them to do and fix as needed. I was hoping there was some open source utility that would do that. I've seen other members with similar stats, which I always find interesting.

 

[Yorkshire_Pud]

If you use only one source to create the csv's then the programming is much more easy, you just look for the relevant information in the csv by column/field number.
My program started out that way and worked for Go, Go4 and the Mavic Mini/FLY. Then DJI started to encrypt the logs and I had to use Phantomhelp to read encrypted logs.
Since, between the two sources, the columns are necessarily in the same order I had to re write it to start using column names.
I imagine a pro programmer could write an equivalent progam in a couple of hours whereas I have to spend ages working out why the results aren't what I think they should be. One bug that took me ages to crack was that the majority of the csv's use the comma as a field separator, I had programmed for that, but a few, for some reason, use a tab as a field separator.
That nearly drove me potty until I used a text reader to look at the csv rather that a spreadsheet program, and saw the difference.

 

[MS Coast]

How high do you feel comfortable sending your mini 1 with regards to altitude? How much wind would you say is too much?

Totally dependent on the wind. I no longer have a Mini, but on days with lighter winds (less than ~15 mph) I was perfectly comfortable flying it to 400' AGL. It's always better to plan your flights so that you're coming back home with the wind.

 

[dan.utinske]

Winds Aloft should certainly be considered IMHO. I use "UAV Forecast" and set my "Gusts" at 400'. This gives me a very good idea of what the wind is doing between the surface and 400'. Always wise to know what's happening above you. I have seen the wind speed at altitude double and triple depending upon conditions.

 

[scro]

I had a mini1, and had no qualms about flying at 120m altitude, provided the conditions were right. Wind speed local to the where the drone is is what matters, and understanding how topography and altitude influence windspeed all play into it. Flying at 120m altitude in the lee of a mountain could be fine, but flying at 5m on the windward side could result in a flyaway.

As a quick check for wind speed I would try flying straight into the wind in S mode and note what the speed tops out at in the live telemetry at the bottom of the screen. In still air the mini1 will do approx 13m/s maximum speed, so if you can't get it to go faster than 3m/s into the wind then the wind speed is about 10m/s (ie 13-3 = 10). If you can't make any progress into the wind then it is definitely time to bring the drone lower or into the lee of some terrain/structures/trees etc. I have done many successful flights where windspeeds were around the 10-15m/s region. My flight plans factored this in and included noting any areas where there could be a lee, turbulence, local "hotspots" of higher wind due to funneling, close monitoring of how the drone was coping, and also a safe downwind emergency landing zone that was well within signal reach (so far I've never needed to do an emergency landing).

There's a lot of useful info to be learned from going out on a windy day and doing some carefully controlled test flights in a sensible location. You'll understand much better what your drone can and can't do and how to handle it in marginal conditions. Much better that than being caught out and having no experience to draw on!