36 years of R/c and I have never had a flyaway I couldnt find, but....On my sixth and obiviuosly last flight of the day my 760mm quad with apm2.5 fatshark transmitter and new gopro hero3 just flew away . I was flying on the farm, all open fields, over 1 mile square . At aprox 1300 feet from me, 150 altitude I attempted to turn and fly back. I had no radio control , the fatshark signal was good for about 3/4 of a mile and I just watched as it flew away. I raced across the farm and still no radio contact.
I did get bac within video range and I got a good view as the quad continued to fly away and video signal again faded.
I have a low voltage failsafe set high enough it should have been able to fly at least back onto the farm but it appears it did not and the signal loss failsafe is set for RTL, which it did not. I have no idea why neither of the failsafes were activated
With the quad lost there is no hope of dwnloading the flight log from the apm to detirmine what happened but is there anything in the telemetry log that might be useful?
Replies
Glad you found it, that's great.
So in a nutshell, what was the cause here? You lost radio contact and it just drifted away on the wind in Stab mode? Or it actively flew away?
here is the vid clip from the onboard gopro. I am so happy I was prop testing, the normal 14" SF props will yield 16 minutes of flight time, the 12" MR props seemed to be good for 4.5 minutes on the same batt .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_rFapRPxHY
Another 7-8 months to wait, then all I'll need is a waterproof metal detector, a shovel, and lots of patience. I will find it.
Found my 760mm quad today in the top of a hickory tree , about 50 feet off the ground next to a cypress swamp. I run one of the little sd card video recorders from hobby king and an immersion uno receiver in addition to my fpv reciever to keep a record of the flight and give me a screen shot to look at altitude and gps coordinates in the event of a flyaway. After this loss I watched the video numerous times thru the recorded flights and about 30 seconds after the signal was lost.
This morning I decided I would sit down and look at the entire clip, frame by frame for the full 20 minutes and see if I could find anything useful, as luck would have it I found the following 4 frames, the last one shows a drastic change in pitch and altitude. Dropped the coordinates in my gps and headed out with a friend. after 30 minute hike in and 30 minutes of climbing over briar patches and stumps we located two prop blades about 3" apart. Roughly 30 minutes later I spotted a hint of the neon green wire mesh gaurd and a mass that had the right shape. Hiked out, picked up a pole saw and climbing tree stand from a friend and roughly 2 hours later the quad was on the ground.
Lesson learned from this was to check parameters every time you head to the field to fly, I have 3 almost identical 760mm quads and the one I fly regularly has the failsafes dialed in, for some reason I thought it was on this one also. Other lesson is make sure your recording the video feed with OSD every time .
still curious about proper antenna placement to avoid future signal loss at such a short distance.I know my lack of diligance in checking all my failsafes before this flight is the end reason my quad was lost , I didnt do a proper pre flight check before running my prop test, but the silly short distance at which Telemetry and Radio signal was lost needs to be solved to avoid any future issues. I flew beyond this point with no issue 3 time earlier in the day .
My fpv antenna and telemetry ant are about 1 foot apart on a telescoping mast aprox 14' above ground level and the radio ant is on the radio case. I have in the past on this same farm flown with clear signal to all 3 devices at a recorded 4500 feet from ground station to model(still line of sight for my large airplane and under 400' elevation). On this flight radio signal was lost around 1000 feet and Telemetry at 1300 even though my spotter still had a clear visual on the model.
A link to some info on proper antenna placement for ground station would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Richard
FS_THR_ENABLE was set to zero, so no failsafe was set to trigger RTL on signal loss. You did have FS_BATT_ENABLE as 1, which lands on being triggered unless you are in Auto, then it will RTL.
http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/failsafe/#Battery_Failsafe
There's also a FS_GCS_ENABLE that would have triggered when you telemetry link failed, which you may want to consider as a future option to trigger RTL if you can no longer command the vehicle using the GCS.
The REMRSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) drops of quite quickly. The telemetry link can be greatly improved by raising the Ground Radio Antenna 2 or metres from the ground, other wise it becomes less sensitive due to the reflected energy from the transmitting side from the ground.
Unfortunately, we don't have the landing spot, and if it landed in the tress it can be really hard to spot.
Post your tlog and we should be able to figure out some of the things that went wrong and maybe why RTL did not happen.
Had you tested RTL recently?
Also where you using the fence feature?
Did you find it?