Hello APM Experts!

I took my airplane out for a test of general waypoint navigation and experienced a few challenges. I'll do more testing and research, but wanted to see if anyone had any tips on what may be causing the "wandering" I experienced:

Set-up:

Airplane: Scratch built "Nova" (standard pusher fixed wing airplane)

APM: APM1 (I do not have airspeed or magnetometer)

Waypoints: Simple 4 - 5 waypoints creating a ~1 mile box

Altitude: 80m

Actions:

Completed proper APM set up and mission load

Took off in stabilize mode

Increased altitude to safe height

Switched to Auto

Results:

1.) Appeared to return to the home location before starting waypoints

2.) Started towards first waypoint, however it was not a straight line path, about 50% of the time it wasn't heading towards the waypoint.

3.) At one point it stops making progress entirely, I switch to RTL and it doesn't respond. (It is about 1/4 mile away at this point)

4.) I hold the Tx above my head and run to the airplane, and as I get closer it switches to RTL and I recover it successfully.

Challenges:

1.) Any suggestions on how to stop it's "wandering"? I do not have a magnetometer yet, however, when I switch it to RTL, it makes an excellent and focused path back to RTL.

2.) I'll be looking at how to change it's loss of signal action to automatically RTL, as it appeared to lose signal and wouldn't RTL by itself unless I walked to it's location to increase signal strength. I did wait about 2-3 minutes before running to the airplane.

3.) Get a new Tx! 1/4 a mile and it loses signal? Seriously? Not cool....

No response needed, if you've got tips, feel free to share. I'll be doing more testing on this and will let you know how it goes.

So far so good! Love this stuff....