So, again there seems to be conflicting information.. When I contacted DJI (pasted in earlier response to this post) they stated that it works just like the diagram.
Control of gimbal goes from second remote, through master remote, and up to the inspire..
Video is a direct downlink from the inspire to each remote independently.
Now, I still don't know what is actually true, but this is what DJI Support emailed me directly..
I hadn't used a slave radio between the end of January and back then I didn't have any noticeable issues and thus kind of dismissed those reports.
That all changed today though as I was camera op on a shoot with a friend, and it was very clear that the slave radio indeed had much poorer video link performance. I'd get video corruption and dropouts occasionally even right next to the machine on the ground, and increasing very quickly with distance becoming pretty much unusable beyond 200-400m, and total loss beyond about 600m. Had to stay tethered to the pilot and connect my T3 to his controller's HDMI port, which worked perfectly normally.
Back to the workshop we did a little test to eliminate a fault from that particular controller by setting up 3 slaves next to each other and comparing during a flight, and all 3 would show similarly poor performance. One was the slave we used on the shoot, the 2nd was my slave, and the 3rd was the master of a 3rd I1 set. The first had an Nvidia Shield as display, the 2nd an iPhone 6, and the 3rd a Galaxy S6. The pilot had a great feed at all times. The mix if devices seems to point the problem to "being slave" indeed, with mobile device type and whether the controller was delivered as a master or slave not being contributing factors.
Friend has flown a few times in dual op setup inbetween but with inexperienced camera/drone operators who'd have had no idea of what to expect and were just probably happy as it was, so it's hard to know when it started and if it was borked by one of the firmware updates, but there definitely seems to be a problem there.
We've been having exactly the same issue - we had no real problems until the last 2 firmware versions . On a recent shoot for a TV ad my Cam-op had unusable video for most of the flights with the video dropping out on the slave remote even when 2 metres from the aircraft. The Master Controller signal was fine with a rock solid signal.
To rule out device or hardware issues we performed tests with different devices & even reset the remotes and swapped them so the slave was bonded to the aircraft as master. Yet the problem still consistently occurred with the slave remote.
Both devices are on the same App version, all hardware is on the same firmware version.
Our next course of action is to see whether reducing the video bit rate improves anything or setting image transmission channels manually helps.
I have a feeling this is related to some kind of timing synch error on the local 5.8GHz link between master & slave controllers - I've raised it with DJI but no response yet ... So in the meantime we'll be tethering a local display from the Master HDMI output.
Totally agree I have already reported but if everyone does this we might stand a chance ! The fact is we never had issues to start with so something has been changed somewhere in the firmware or Pilot app..Me should ALL report this to DJI. They listen to issues where there are trends/many reports. Please report this to DJI support and we may have a chance of getting it fixed.
Having the same problem too...
With a new bird, 3 hours total flight time; the slave have worked flawless for about 15min. I have tried Ipad mini 2, Hdmi output etc. Running a long HDMI cable from master till solved.
DJI Ticket sent
you send them an e-mail. depending where you are (country) - check their homepage for more info on whom to write to exactly.I'm having the same problem too.. Funny thing is, it worked for 2 days.. Then it decide to have no signal on slave RC. Camera control and functions still linked to master.. Just no visuals.
How do I send DJI ticket?
Hello All,
So what was the final solution, if any, to this? I'm experiencing this now as well.
Master/iphone6plus - no drop outs.
Slave/ipad mini 3 video drop outs.
Con't contact DJI. They never respond. Help please. Thanks.
When I did tests about that we used 4 different remotes from different batches, and a mix of android and iOS devices - all combinations exhibited the problem.
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