Hello all,
I have a drone with the Herelink system factory installed, and am having some complications with the setup. About a month ago, we did a great test out in Oregon in very wide open rolling fields, and had good telemetry, radio, video range out to at least 2 km, and I was happy with that. The drone was running a large area scan mission and turned at all different angles from us, with no dropouts.
Then, we shipped the unit to Kansas and tried running it there. About 0.5 km away from us, when the drone turned perpendicular to us, we lost connection with the Herelink and all the failsafes activated. It returned to home, and wasn’t even regaining the connection until it was nearly directly above us. Since then it has been very intermittent and does not have the range that it did on the first tests. Upon careful inspection, we saw a crack in one of the antennas on the Herelink controller and decided to swap the Herelink controller entirely with a new one. We did the pairing procedure and made sure it was all reconnected to the drone.
Took it up for another test with a brand new controller and still lost connection about 0.5 km away, and then didn’t regain the connection easily, even as it approached us coming back to home.
These are wide open fields with no visual obstructions.
The drone itself is using the Herelink antenna upgrade kit, with the antennas mounted to the body panel of the drone.
Are there other typical reasons why this could happen? Is it very likely that there is anything wrong with the air unit itself that could cause this type of intermittent signal loss that’s so much worse than the original test?
Have others had issues with dramatic variations in range, depending on nearby RF towers, interference, etc? If so, is there any way around this if it’s environmental? And how would be a good way to prove it? (e.g. should I go so far as to buy some kind of RF meter or something)?
Please let me know thoughts if anyone has ideas or similar experiences.
Thanks.