Inspire 1 Signal Issues

[SVG]

I've noticed when I fly around my house, the signal for both video and the remote are high/maxed, however the gimbal/camera is slow to respond/update on my phone sometimes. Also, 1 single channel is hardly ever continuously stable/continuously used. I'm using auto channel selection. Am I doing something wrong or is there something I can do to improve this? I was considering the DBSMods kit.

I want to fly further away from my house than just 50-200 feet as I've done so far. I want to test the range and see how far it'll go. However, I've heard bad things about the RTH feature. I'd love to fly it a few hundred feet away and test the RTH mode, but if it goes out of control or looks like it's going to crash, is there a switch I can flip to regain manual control? From what I've read, once you hit RTH your control is limited to altitude control. How can I safely test RTH, auto land and auto takeoff whilst still being able to regain control should things go south?

Thanks guys, any advice is appreciated

 

[Auspete]

My understanding from page 28 of the manual is that if you press RTH button again it will cancel RTH and give you full control back again

 

[sanderx]

That is correct. Make sure you hold the RTH button for a second until you hear a beep. Just a short press will not activate or deactivate RTH (which is good).

 

[zackski]

Also check your bird, it could be in beginner mode which limits the distance.

 

[MonroePoteet]

I've tested the RTH from about 100m (330ft) away, and it works fine. I make sure the home point is set correctly (green H bubble on the map), then hold RTH for a couple of seconds until the beep. The RTH behavior I've observed is that the craft 1) stops, 2) rises to the failsafe height you've set, 3) orients on the home point, 4) flies to above the home point, 5) lowers the landing gear, and 6) autolands. I've got to admit I took over for the actual landing about 10 feet above the ground since I wanted to land in a particular spot, but the craft was doing a great job by itself. Yes, press-and-hold RTH again on the controller for a couple of seconds returns control to you.

I don't think it's the RTH function that results in fly-aways or other bad behavior. I think the GPS / compass / sensor based "automatic" flying and stabilization can backfire when faced with contradictory or insufficient data, resulting in the bad behaviors. A recent post made by Djalma Ribeiro referenced an excellent webpage talking about vulnerabilities in the sensor-based flight mode:

http://www.inspirepilots.com/threads/motor-or-esc-failure-inspire1-meets-lake.4228/page-3#post-46470

I don't think DJI has found the right algorithms for "spotting the loony" in the sensor data and either re-calibrating it based upon other sensors / instruments, or ignoring the bad data. For example, they could potentially use differential GPS to spot a bad compass calibration or localized magnetic interference and determine a correction factor until the compass is recalibrated or the craft leaves the area of magnetic interference, or ignore the compass input. The algorithms in the craft firmware certainly don't seem to have a "damping coefficient" on flight maneuvers that don't come from the operator (i.e. sensor based maneuvers).

A pilot friend of mine told me that when flying an airplane, the pilot uses a sanity cross-check among all the instruments to determine if one of them is malfunctioning, and there's actually a suction-cup mask you can put over the instrument if you don't trust it anymore.

Flying by sight (i.e. ATTI mode) can bypass the sensor-based flight mode, but RTH isn't available. So, using RTH requires relying on sensor-based flight mode, which can go haywire.

mTp