Hoverfly Scary 3.5 mile Fly-Away, RTH did not work

[yeehaanow]

Not 100% hoverfly's fault, because my ezUHF Tx failed shortly after arming, sending the bird up at 55% throttle and set to RTH... but RTH is not working in the latest firmware for me and probably would've helped.

Also, if you notice, the distance to home swings around wildly.

I never thought this could happen, but here it did. I got very very lucky.
I think I will set my failsafe throttle to below hover, so it will descend slowly.

 

[Bartman]

wow, you found it AND it wasn't damaged! that's pretty amazing.

Bart

 

[Razzil]

Crazy, can you explain again how you found it.

 

[yeehaanow]

We guessed where it might be with my downlink antenna out the car window. I saw a little blip on the screen and followed it into a field. Having a shoulder rig and a screen that doesn't bluescreen was really helpful.
The closer I got, the better the signal got, and I blocked the antenna with my hand on different sides that indicated which direction it was in.
When I first saw a faint image of it down I thought it was up in a tree!

 

[JZSlenker]

WOW! So happy you found it and no one was hurt!

 

[cademan]

Thats it...im not flying mine anymore...haha. good vid and great to hear u got i back.

Sent from my fishing boat.

 

[BorisS]

wow you are super luckily on that one ! Happy for you that nothing worse happened !!!

ezUHF is a tricky one and strange if it looses PPM signal from the trainer port it doesnt go into failsage right away, only if you pull the power plug. But I guess it was different for you !

Boris

 

[Roger Ramjet]

Go buy some lottery tickets! It is your lucky week!!!!

Happy everything turned out OK. What a story!!!

 

[Jake Bullit]

Scary, and amazing you found it undamaged,especially in the long grass.

Good job it came down short of the forest

 

[Krzysiek]

It would be good to have coordinates on the OSD instead of percentage (it is useless, you already have quality control - LED's on the board).

 

[yeehaanow]

I agree. And since I'm running 6s I can't use the boards voltage monitor either. So the only thing I use is the alt and distance to home, but it appears that doesn't work either!
My plan was to use the ezOSD but not sure I'll be using the UHF system anymore after what happened.
I did buy a lottery ticket yesterday, but I feel like I'm a winner already.

 

[S11D336B]

Wow. I'm glad to see you recovered it ok. We would like to get the logs from your GPS board, if you can provide them. We also need the date of the incident. We'd like very much to find out why this happened so we can either fix it or learn something from it. Return to home has been tested very will with the latest firmware and does (on our setups at least) work pretty well.

To submit the logs, just create a support request on zendesk. http://hoverflytech.zendesk.com
You can copy-paste your post.

Then zip up the contents of the SD card on your HoverflyGPS and attach it to the request.

We appreciate you doing this as it will give us (and you) insight as to what exactly happened.

Thanks,
George

I agree. And since I'm running 6s I can't use the boards voltage monitor either. So the only thing I use is the alt and distance to home, but it appears that doesn't work either!
My plan was to use the ezOSD but not sure I'll be using the UHF system anymore after what happened.
I did buy a lottery ticket yesterday, but I feel like I'm a winner already.

 

[S11D336B]

One more thing. The compass is indicating 17 degrees for your heading. Can you confirm that the multirotor was facing roughly north when this happened?

I agree. And since I'm running 6s I can't use the boards voltage monitor either. So the only thing I use is the alt and distance to home, but it appears that doesn't work either!
My plan was to use the ezOSD but not sure I'll be using the UHF system anymore after what happened.
I did buy a lottery ticket yesterday, but I feel like I'm a winner already.

 

[Razzil]

This may be irrelevant, but where did you get a GPS lock last, before this flight.
Was it in the direction of where it was heading? It was flying like it was going home.
Again, may be irrelevant, but it was my first thought when I seen it.

 

[yeehaanow]

One more thing. The compass is indicating 17 degrees for your heading. Can you confirm that the multirotor was facing roughly north when this happened?

I will send my logs.

It was facing roughly North, but in all my testing so far the compass has not really worked, and it tends to face about 15 deg all the time.
I installed the ext mag. But it was set to off in AL mode. This was the issue I was trying to diagnose.

 

[S11D336B]

I wonder if there is a problem with the voltage your HoverflyPro was getting. Your battery indicated 7v. Which is the bare minimum you can feed your HoverflyPro. With the HoverflyGPS installed, a higher voltage may help. I'm guessing you're using a 2s battery to power your HoverflyPro. Why not use the main battery?

I will send my logs.

It was facing roughly North, but in all my testing so far the compass has not really worked, and it tends to face about 15 deg all the time.
I installed the ext mag. But it was set to off in AL mode. This was the issue I was trying to diagnose.

 

[yeehaanow]

I use a 6S power system so the HF is powered from a BEC set at 9v. I haven't calibrated the voltage display because it didn't matter to see the real voltage.

 

[yeehaanow]

This may be irrelevant, but where did you get a GPS lock last, before this flight.
Was it in the direction of where it was heading? It was flying like it was going home.
Again, may be irrelevant, but it was my first thought when I seen it.

GPS lock was at the launch site. The last lock before that was across the road about 10 ft away. Good thinking though

 

[baldwinc]

Glad you got it back! But I gotta say, that's some impressive flight time...

 

[yeehaanow]

And those are my smaller older packs. only 8000 mah.
I can get a full 12 min with the gh2. But I only ever fly 10, to save some for emergency reserve power.