dazzab
Member
Occasionally I have seen incidents where a copter becomes uncontrollable. Users often times conclude that the cause might be radio interference, typically in the 2.4Ghz range that our Tx use. A very reliable source told me that the incident in Geraldton Australia, where a women participating in a marathon was hit by an out of control multirotor, might have been caused by interference from the transponders that the marathon runners were wearing. He claimed that they had reproduced the results in a lab.
Over the weekend I brought this up with a very knowledgable developer of flight controller software. He seemed to think that any kind of interference on 2.4 could not do anything but block the signal being received given that the signal itself has checksums and therefore the receiver would not pass on any valid data to the FC. In such a case a properly configured controller/receiver should go in to failsafe rather than loose control because what it would see is loss of signal resulting from the signal being swamped.
Given his in depth knowledge on the topic I'm really interested in knowing if anyone has any definitive research on the topic rather than just antidotal evidence? Does anyone know of any real research on what effect radio interference has on multi rotors or what causes these incidents where a copter just loses all control?
While I'm on the topic, we were advised at recent training for CASA (Australian FAA equivalent) certification to use signal scanners to check for interference before flights and that this might prevent a situation such as had happened in Geraldton. Does anyone actually use these scanners as part of their safety procedures?
Over the weekend I brought this up with a very knowledgable developer of flight controller software. He seemed to think that any kind of interference on 2.4 could not do anything but block the signal being received given that the signal itself has checksums and therefore the receiver would not pass on any valid data to the FC. In such a case a properly configured controller/receiver should go in to failsafe rather than loose control because what it would see is loss of signal resulting from the signal being swamped.
Given his in depth knowledge on the topic I'm really interested in knowing if anyone has any definitive research on the topic rather than just antidotal evidence? Does anyone know of any real research on what effect radio interference has on multi rotors or what causes these incidents where a copter just loses all control?
While I'm on the topic, we were advised at recent training for CASA (Australian FAA equivalent) certification to use signal scanners to check for interference before flights and that this might prevent a situation such as had happened in Geraldton. Does anyone actually use these scanners as part of their safety procedures?
