Lost MP - any advice?

Hello

Feeling a bit foolish. It was windy, but ‘took a chance’ due to an interesting shot.

I’d had a couple of high wind messages, but drone seemed to handle it well. I had a low signal message so sent the drone sideways so I wasn’t under the legs/antennas. Shortly after, I lost all signal, I did a down command, but nothing.

I searched the area and several hundred metres down wind, but never picked up any signal.

I looked at the logs and went back yesterday and spent another couple of hours searching, nothing.

I can upload my DJI files from my phone, but also I’m after advice on what should be my next steps to take.

Should I report through dronesafe?/Police/house insurance?

I’m sure I’m not the first.

Thanks, now back to the painting, before I get into serious trouble!

Kind regards
Jerry

I’ll write more later.

You could try https://dronesreunited.uk/ although I see there are a lot of lost drones reported there and no found ones!

If you have a friend with a drone, you could overfly the area to see if you can spot it from above, but if there’s a lot of scrub the chances are low.

I thought the MP had this? but i may be wrong, sorry for the loss

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Hello

I had no connection to the drone at all. It was only 60m up and 60m out, so should have been booming in. The find my drone feature is good, but there is really poor O2 coverage, and yesterday I took my work phone on a different network.

The cliff has probably a 20° slope and near to me was large patches of gorse. The grass in-between clumps is kept short by sheep. Further down wind is just more grass (and sheep) which is why I flew in that direction WNW. In fact this was the reason I made the decision to fly was that there was a large safety area to land in down wind, all be it on a bit of a slope.

Of course the sun was also at that elevation and azimuth, so when I looked up from the controller, I couldn’t see anything.

Kind regards

Jerry

Being a positive kind of person I reckon its a safe bet its still out there waiting for you. Ditch the painting, get a few mates involved and use a map for a grid search - you will find it. The ground looks prickly but easy enough to search properly. 60M x 60M and its last known point should not be too difficult to calculate search circles - go have a dabble - id be out for 24 hours regardless lol

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Have you looked at your logs to check if home point was recorded correctly?

When you lost signal unless you had it set to hover it should have tried to return to homepoint. If this was incorrect it could be at an unexpected location or somewhere along the way to it.

You mentioned wind. During a disconnect RTH the mavic will travel at a max of 22mph i think. If you had a constant head wind of 22mph it would remain static, 23mph and it would be blown backwards etc.

How windy was it?

Post up your logs and it might offer some insight.

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DJIFlightRecord_2020-05-31_[18-08-01].txt (527.8 KB) 20-05-31-06-07-20_FLY249.DAT (2.2 MB)

It helps if I actually click on the reply button!

We returned to the site, but no joy. As there’s no zoom on the Mavic Pro, here’s a cropped last picture…

Only had a quick look but seems it was struggling a bit with wind and had some drift without any input. This was around 165ft altitude.

Your RTH height was set for 100m so on disconnection it would have risen to around 330ft.

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And probably taken it for a swim.

Thanks. Looking at the data, there seems to be no significant loss of signal, I only took off due to the fact that the wind was blowing onshore (I know a bit about geostrophic rotation from oceanography) , so I’m wondering what would cause the catastrophic comm failure? The battery falling out? An arm failing with the antenna?

Normally I wouldn’t have flown, but post lockdown and an aircraft carrier…

I’ll try claiming on my house insurance. I’ll find out if being an idiot is covered, I’ve only had one other claim and that was spilling tomato juice and Worcestershire sauce in a Sony pro Walkman, 30 years ago.

I’m going to miss the MPro😪

Kind regards

Jerry

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Which of the two files do you normally get the information from? I realise these are only a decimated subset of the file recorded on the SD card.

I’ll have a look to see why in the past I had so many signal loss messages. I always thought it was due to the way I normally fly. Take off, send the Mavic off about 20-50m then up to frame the shot. This would mean I’m almost under the drone and with a vertical polarization of the link, I expected a lower signal.

Kind regards
Jerry

Ps the decorating is finished, I did have to replace the screws on a castor on the piano. I may be allowed a new replacement drone…

Little tip for you.

Call and ask if your drone is covered, dont let on youve lost it from the get go.

If its not covered and you’ve told them about a loss or incident it still gets recorded on CUE database regardless if you claimed or not.

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You have my full sympathy here @jpigleth, I lost my MP in the sea last Tuesday.

I’d still like to take a boat out deeper to see if it’s there, but really needs a diver to search properly.

My home contents specifically excludes ‘UAVs’ so I’m out of luck there.

Good luck with your next move, I’m undecided what to do. I’d probably buy a decently priced basic MP kit, as I have the accessories, but the M2P on sale is tempting.
If I knew the M3P was definitely round the corner, I’d get saving, and get an MP to keep learning with.

I’m sure its the round the corner, the corner could be a long one though, although the rumour mill would have you believe this summer.

Going to be a lot of MP’s for sale then I think from the folks who ‘skipped the 2’, mine included ;o)

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I have diving gear… but not used it for 17 years. Joys of family life! I drained the cylinder down to 2 bar… I think!

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