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Lost Quad. Looking for help narrowing search with Flight Logs.

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Hi guys. I am new to the forum. I have been flying RC for 30 years. I have been flying FPV for about 5 years. My main quad is Inspire. About 2 weeks ago I purchased the Mavic Pro Platinum. The portability looked amazing! I had about 20 flights in with it. Yesterday while flying I got multiple strong interference warnings while returning to home. Then my controller disconnected. I have not seen my Mavic since. I used find my drone to find the last transmitted coordinates. My wife and I have spent several hours walking through swamps and cow poop to no avail. After reflecting on the situation and thinking about what I should have done differently, I am stuck with a question that is making tracking down the Mavic very difficult. Toward the end of the flight I received multiple high interference warnings and my controller disconnected. I was descending while this happened. Part of me thinks the Mavic still continued to descend but I was not getting updated telemetry. This would have made me believe I was at a higher elevation than I actually was. I am thinking the Mavic might have descended into a group of trees and crashed. On the other hand I am thinking when the controller disconnected the Mavic kept flying but because of the interference never sent updated coordinates or any other telemetry. Then I am guessing the battery got low and it auto landed.

Despite the high interference, Mavic seemed to be flying the correct course to get back to the home point. Therefore if the interference affected the compass or gps then it happened after it disconnected form the controller.

I have searched around the last transmitted coordinates and walked a lot of the projected flight path. I am thinking about possibly flying Inspire over the last transmitted coordinates and seeing if I can get a different perspective of the area.


I know some of you guys are really **** good at reading and interpreting flight log information and could possibly help me narrow my search hopefully recovering the Mavic.



Any help would be very much appreciated.
 
It must have ran into trees after it went into RTH. You weren't able to save any video? Sometimes the video you have in cache ... of it before it went down will give you an idea of the surroundings. I feel your pain ... been there more than once.
 
It must have ran into trees after it went into RTH. You weren't able to save any video? Sometimes the video you have in cache ... of it before it went down will give you an idea of the surroundings. I feel your pain ... been there more than once.
It must have ran into trees after it went into RTH. You weren't able to save any video? Sometimes the video you have in cache ... of it before it went down will give you an idea of the surroundings. I feel your pain ... been there more than once.
Unfortunately I was not able to save any video. I am going to continue the search again this morning.
 
I thought the logs had a gps location included?
Yes the god coordinates are included in flight logs. I went to the last know gps coordinates and the Mavic was not there. I plan on expanding the search around the coordinates today. One thing I have noticed though is that the last know location differs between the flight logs and find my drone. Anyone know why this might be?
 
The GPS RTH accuracy on the recent drones is pretty good, but it can continue moving a little bit after the C2 downlink has been lost, so, I'd suggest that you take the track you had between the last point and your recorded home point. At the last recorded point add a circle 40-50ft around that point, and then draw a triangle from the outside of that circle back in towards your home point/where you took off from. your drone should hopefully lie somewhere within that triangle. Look for any trees or elevated ground within that triangle that it could have flown into. If there are trees check outwards from their base, don't necessarily assume it will be underneath them as it's momentum could have meant it tumbled sideways through branches.

Also, what RTH settings did you have dialled in? Hover? Land ? Return to take off point? What RTH altitude was set? Did you activate RTH manually? Did your C2 link actually drop out, or did you just think it did? Often people think the loss of video transmission is the same as a loss of C2 link... it isn't, so the aircraft can carry on flying further than you realise still under your control... aka you could well have flown it into the ground, or to a lower altitude than you thought depending on what you did at the time. Finally, what sort of wind did you have... direction & strength - if it did lose gps lock, then the wind would add some drift in and it could have gone downwind for a distance :(

What was the warning about interference? Did it say compass error or IMU error or just strong interference? If the latter, then the compass etc should have been ok as the interference it was describing is just on the 2.4/5.8Ghz C2 band.

just a few thoughts to keep you going ... good luck!
 
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