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Weird GPS loss

SPS

Joined
Aug 17, 2016
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Okay, here's one I have not seen before. I was shooting a rural property with my Inspire 1.2 RAW, had a good satellite count on liftoff, did my usual "hold at 15 AGL" so that I could walk under aircraft and listen for anything unexpected and also check battery cell condition, then I started my climb-out. At 30' AGL I lost all satellites and the aircraft went in to "opti" mode. The crosswind was kinda stiff, but I landed without issue and powered down, pulled the battery, then powered back up and tried again from a slightly different location. Same thing. I then moved again, re-calibrated everything, had the same thing happen a third time. The property owner was there, and said that he had some sat uplinks going form one of the buildings (about 200 feet away) so we got into his ATV and went out into the middle of the property, which was well over 1,000 feet away from anything except trees. All was well until about 30 AGL, when all sats vanished and I had to fight serious crosswind through trees to a fast landing with gear up. Bird is fine but the cheap little gimball arm on my X5R broke, so it is back to California for that.
I've had GPS flake on me before, but never like this. We were in a completely rural area, that last time we were quite a ways away from anything. I had not flown in a while, so did some simple check-flying yesterday to check for potential update strangeness and did not find any major issues. Has anyone seen anything like this?
 
Yes, I have had similar issues with specific locations, usually ones with obvious heavy reliance on radio comms links/radar such as ports.

The GPS loss can sometime be very position specific so just climbing up or moving 20-50m and hovering for 20-30 seconds (important) can often cure it. It’s strange that you still had the issue when you relocated 1000ft away but perhaps you were just unlucky.

I always practice ATTI mode flight regularly (ideally when it’s windy) so that when it becomes the only flight option available I can still maintain full control. This is one reason why I cannot understand DJI’s decision to exclude a manual ATTI mode from the Mavic (& Spark?) range as without it your first experience of ATTI flight will be during an actual emergency situation, which is crazy!
 
I agree -- atti practice is a necessity, and I have had to thread my way down thru trees with no GPS and plenty of crosswind more than once. I have not flown much lately (atti or otherwise) and although that was almost certainly part of my problem, I think still think something else was going on as well...not sure what. I had re-calibrated compass on site, but could not re-calibrate IMU since I had already flown. I returned to the site last week with everything re-set, and aside from elevated heart rate (and, no doubt,blood pressure) everything went without a hitch.
I didn't know that about the Mavic and possibly Spark. Really? Like....what could possibly go worng?
 
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I had the same problems with the compass at my last job a week ago. Very strange that I couldn't calibrate, on the middle of a beach, without any kind of interference. My Mavic didn't have any trouble at all. My guess is a flaw in the latest GO3 update (stupid that I accepted the update at all). My I1 never had any compass issues before, in more than 3 years now.
 
Okay, here's one I have not seen before. I was shooting a rural property with my Inspire 1.2 RAW, had a good satellite count on liftoff, did my usual "hold at 15 AGL" so that I could walk under aircraft and listen for anything unexpected and also check battery cell condition, then I started my climb-out. At 30' AGL I lost all satellites and the aircraft went in to "opti" mode. The crosswind was kinda stiff, but I landed without issue and powered down, pulled the battery, then powered back up and tried again from a slightly different location. Same thing. I then moved again, re-calibrated everything, had the same thing happen a third time. The property owner was there, and said that he had some sat uplinks going form one of the buildings (about 200 feet away) so we got into his ATV and went out into the middle of the property, which was well over 1,000 feet away from anything except trees. All was well until about 30 AGL, when all sats vanished and I had to fight serious crosswind through trees to a fast landing with gear up. Bird is fine but the cheap little gimball arm on my X5R broke, so it is back to California for that.
I've had GPS flake on me before, but never like this. We were in a completely rural area, that last time we were quite a ways away from anything. I had not flown in a while, so did some simple check-flying yesterday to check for potential update strangeness and did not find any major issues. Has anyone seen anything like this?
I also lost my gps signal yesterday.
(clear day no clouds 6/25) fand my I one landed in trees. Still accessing the damage. Does anyone know what DJI is doing to fix the problem and they should also repair the damage units at no charge.
 

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