Hi Folks
I tested out the APM 2.5 in the weekend, the first flight went down in manual mode even before the stabilise mode is switched on. The second flight went well in stabilise mode and i adjusted the gains in the air to stabilise it even better and it did work. It flew very well the whole day.
Then we had a battery drain, so we had to pack up, when we flew the next day, the aircraft went upto 450 metres from the GCS in manual mode then we lost radio control and had a nasty crash which broke the airframe however the APM and other electronics are safe.
When we investigated, the receiver in the plane was not working after a range of 150 meters when connected along with the APM in manual mode, then we removed APM out of the loop and did the same test and it was working well even after a range of 200 meters.
Could there be interference between the 3DR 915 MHz radio i'm using for telemetry and the futaba receiver (72 MHz) for manual control in the plane or was the APM interfering with the radio signals ?
Please help.
Replies
You may need to decrease the P rate lower for rol and or pitch. You need to slow down the control response as currently it would seem that they overshooting. They are aggressive, it gives snappier response, but it means the servos are working too hard.
Can you post a datalog? You can also do this and graph roll out and pitch out to see what's happening.
Any transmitting device on your plane can interfere with another. Best practice is to keep antennas as far apart as possible, and away from anything metallic e.g pitot tube. The problem is that your rc receiver is desensitizing due to the interference. If we say the source of the interference is the 915MHz radio a solution could be as simple as putting a 72MHz low pass filter on the receiver so it's not seeing the 915MHz signal so strong. If the source of the interference is from the power supply, also capacitor can be used to filter off that source of interference.
I would recommend searching the FPV forums on rcgroups.com etc.. for information on how to reduce interference from the separate radios on your set-up. People there doing long-range FPV have some really good tips.
Post a pic of your setup, as it's a good way to help with this type of question.