Flew my first wing yesterday with an ELRS RC link, V3 2.4GHz
Had a failsafe at about 570m from Home, altitude at 120m. Did not expect that.
Having looked at my ELRS settings I can see that not much thought had gone into them so I’ve made these changes based on JB video, ‘I learnt something today’
(TX is RadioMaster ZORRO internal ELRS)
packet rate, was 500Hz, now 150Hz
Telem ratio, was 1:128, now 1:32
Also ordered a quality RM antenna, the Happy Model ones are a bit crap.
I’m wondering what others are using on a mid range wing
Be good to have other views
Edit: RX antenna was a ‘T’ type not a ceramic block
Be very careful and avoid water. I know of two people who’ve lost quads over water using ELRS (posted on a different board). For LR I don’t think it is mature enough and I also don’t think using it on a Zorro or Jumper will cut it either. If you are going to do it on a serious level, it’s probably better to get a large radio and have it run on an external module. At least that way you also have the option of mounting a more powerful antenna and/or helical setup on a tripod to maybe gain some more range and better uplink, or tie it into a ground station.
The furthest i have flown my 85mm, is about 500m, and I was running 100mw @ 250hz packet rate (i think on the packet rate). It handled brilliantly, but I was in a place with open fields, no trees, no power lines, no houses with wifi, no mobile phone towers. Flying in semi-urban is going to be less perfect. Also my Jumper got a bit warm at 100mw. I originally intended to try at 250mw, but 100mw is fine out to half a km. Without active cooling I wonder what sort of thermal issues are being generated in the radio and whether they are causing the failsafes.
So the takeaway, as far as I am concerned is:
Power at least 50mw if not 100mw.
Packet rate, whatever works for you.
Max half a km.
I know CurryKitten regularly flies ELRS out to a km and on a couple of vids did 1.5km and 2km (i think). So it will do it. But he also flies in open fields away from houses and interference.
Anyway, I have no experience of fixed wing, but if it can be configured with RTH, i would do it. When you fly ELRS, trust nothing, expect it to fail.
Honestly for LR, I would use crossfire. The tech is mature and it’s a known quantity. ELRS is still too experimental for true LR flights. Maybe in a year or two it will improve, but for now I view it more like a protocol that runs on cheap hardware and is best suited to flights within half a km LoS (or near enough) on small quads of 3" or less. If you want to hit the km mark, then i would use something better. Quads and planes cost a lot of money. Can’t really afford to lose them due to a crappy link.
I run elrs on my jumper t lite with happmodel module. 250mW 150Hz. Using happymodel ep1 and ep2 rx. But with original happymodel tx antennas and betafpv ones that are more resilient.
I’ve never had a failsafe. I’ve flown through trees, bandos and 2.1km LOS.
You’ve got your settings wrong if you are limited to 500m.
@notveryprettyboy and I have been analysing the video/OSD feed from yesterdays crash
I now don’t believe we had a failsafe occurence. The Emergency Landing mode was triggered by a failed RTH,
The wing did RTH but then instead of circling, it overshot and after the INAV nav_rth_abort_threshold = 50000 was reached it tried to land.
I’ll do more testing, but considering the views of JB, Snipes and others I don’t think you can call ELRS immature any longer it’s proving to be very capable
I’m a long term CRSF fan, won’t ever move from it, but I do think ELRS at 2.4GHz has it place in smaller short and medium range craft.
I chose to experiment with it for a smaller antenna on a smaller craft.
It’s hard to get past maybe 150mw on the gamepad radios with builtin ELRS. The casing gets majorly hot. Technically my Jumper T-Pro will do the full watt, but the heat generated to do that makes it too hot to hold. on an external module, it isn’t really an issue since they mainly come with a fan for active cooling.
Maybe immature was the wrong wording. I personally, wouldn’t trust a £200-300+ drone with it for a 1-2km flight. I know that Crossfire has been around a while and people regularly use it for flights far beyond 2km without issue, so for a LR build, it makes sense to go with what works and what other people use for that exact reason. At the end of the day it’s down to the individual as to whether they use it for reason X, whether X is freestyle, LR, or whooping around.
But saying that I also fly ELRS. I would probably fly more than half a km, but in my case, none of my quads have GPS and for me that is a requirement for LR. half a km, I could wander to the general area and hit the buzzer and go find it, but more than that and yeah having a set of GPS coordinates would be better. Also flying half a km out and back on a 2S 660mAh Lipo is interesting.
I’m in agreement with you, Steve. As you know I use the IRC Ghost system but I’m thinking of switching over to ELRS. I haven’t had any operational issues with Ghost but trying to get Receivers has proven to be frustrating this year due to the BREXIT crap. I can order them from Orqa but their postage charges are OTT, then there’s the hassle of import charges.
With the very recent release of the Radiomaster modules I think ELRS can now be considered to be in the same league as the TBS and IRC 2.4GHz LoRa systems.
Agreed Nidge, these new modules now give the full power capability and build quality to overcome any perceived inadequacies of the ‘game-pad’ TX’s
I say perceived as I’m just starting the ELRS journey and need to get more experienced and proficient, I’m certainly no expert.
I’m not abandoning CSFR, which has served me well for six years plus, It’s just good to have new technologies to assess and play with. Us guys like our toys
good point @DeanoG60 some small whoop F411 boards are short on UARTS so you could re-map and use one for both control on SBUS and GPS which just needs a single RX line
so I’ve made these changes based on JB video, ‘I learnt something today’
