The Editor, thanks heaps for your answer. And yes, it is a help. Why can't there be an endorsed "Bible" on the Inspire 1 - endorsed by DJI? Because they still have their instructional videos with "experts" in DJI shirts and coats stating that you must calibrate "each time" you fly. Refer to their video
at the 2 minute mark, where they state " you need to recalibrate each time" and that video is sourced from the DJI website :-
http://www.dji.com/product/inspire-1/video under
DJI Inspire 1 Tutorial "How To Fly" . Note that this instructional video is on the official DJI YouTube channel. Now I'm not trying to dispute what you say, but I do worry about the fact that DJI will not cover warranty unless you follow their instructions to the letter, and try very hard to get you on a technicality in the event of a claim. I have been there on a faulty camera / gimbal and they tried every angle to check I did everything correctly - which I did, and eventually they replaced it. You certainly are able to back your advice with the technical facts which I'm assuming are correct, and I really want to try NOT calibrating all the time, just checking the sensors readouts and fly if they appear correct.
But I still have some questions that are puzzling me. For example, you say to do one good calibration in a place that is free of all the items that are going to cause a calibration to be a "false correct" one, and after takeoff, when the aircraft moves further away from the offending items, it becomes inaccurate. So I'm assuming that when you do this calibration, the sensors readouts are good, but become bad after flying away and out of range of their influence. So if everything appears OK with the readouts, and that is the thing that you use to determine if the calibration has been OK, my question is - How do you know where a good location to do a good calibration actually is? Yes, we can see visually steel objects and power lines etc. and car keys, mobile phones etc as well. But if magnetic influences caused by the amount of iron in the ground or similar is equally a problem, I have no idea how to know where a good calibration site is. Is it just try it and see, and if the aircraft flys well, then that is a good calibration?
Also, if the sensors readouts are affected by those local anomalies and influenced by them, how do I know if the readouts are in fact good, but being temporarily influenced by a local "bad item" and the act of doing a new calibration at that particular spot because of that bad sensors readout is actually turning a good calibration that is looking bad because of those local influences into a bad calibration that will look good until I take off and leave the "bad influences" which would then have it reading bad. Whew!! I know what I mean, but I'm not sure I am making myself clear! But it is confusing the hell out of me to the point I really am very nervous about flying at all, and I go out, do a calibration, check readouts, take off and hover for a minute or so at about 2-3 metres and see if everything responds properly, and if it does I slowly move further away and so on. But by the time I am actually flying the aircraft, the battery is down to about 70% and I bring it back at 30% or so which isn't very efficient.
The weird thing about all this is when I first got my Inspire 1, I had never heard of checking sensors readouts because I followed DJI's instructions. You will notice that they still don't tell you to check the sensors readout at all in that instructional video I mention above. I just did the circular dance, put it on the ground, and took off. I would have made about 60 flights like this before I ever heard of checking the sensors and never had an issue. It's strange that the more careful I've become due to learning more, the more hassles and anomalies I've had. Only once was it a real issue which ended fine, but it seems that I find more problems as I've become more experienced in terms of flights completed. That might be co-incidence, but I certainly enjoyed flying much more in the beginning probably because I was not looking for problems. Now I'm nervous for the beginning of every flight and much more aware of potential problems, and it takes away from the enjoyment and certainly makes me fly a lot less. The last 2 flight sessions I've done have been hovering at 2 metres just to run down batteries because DJI say that unless I do that, I might run into some other problems with batteries.
So thanks for your advice, which sounds like good advice, and apologies for long-winded replies like this one, but I really would like to learn to operate the Inspire 1 absolutely properly, and I have only got avenues such as this forum to source the information, and be able to ask questions.
I guess that's an apology of sorts for being a pain, along with very sincere thanks.