Better signal with different antenna angle

[miskairal]

Yay, I finally got more to 500m (1640ft)
Samsung S5 phone, App 3.1.3, version 1.7.9 Identical drone to my son's purchased at the same time (4 months ago), from the same shop. My son lives in a slightly more built up area than I, 5 hour's drive away. I live on a farm with the nearest house 500m away and we have no mobile reception so I doubt I would get interference from anything much. The farthest away I've ever been able to go without loss of signal and RTH kicking in is 300m and that was only once, normally 200m pulls it up. My son can get 800m

I've not tried relinking the RC as I'm wary of them not reconnecting. I have read hundreds of posts here, watched quite a few videos and ensured I had the antenna facing the way it's meant to but have tried moving it from straight out to straight up in the past. Apparently I've never moved it the way I did yesterday......straight up but I pushed it away from the phone. Suddenly I had green again and was able to push the bird out to over 500m. Battery was getting low so came back.

Went for another fly this morning in a different paddock and actually got over 600m. It kept saying weak image transmission but never said weak signal. Then all of a sudden the screen lost all colour and it said Disconnected. No RTH seemed to kick in but I was able to make it fly backwards toward me. All happened pretty quick and I got nervous b/c I was over a creek. After that was able to get out 500m easily but lost sight (how does one get to 1000m and keep line of sight?). This morning I had a home made windsurfer that I made right before I went out with cardboard, alfoil and sticky tape - will require some further experiments to see if it made any difference.

My question is why is this working? Could it be a bad connection that is fixed by this angle for me alone as I've never read about this angle before?

A picture of the type of area I normally fly in with the red arrow pointing to me (yes, it's a drought) and one of the RC with it's new antenna position

 

[GrammatonxXXxCleric]

Antennas need to be parallel to the drone. Straight up.

 

[miskairal]

Antennas need to be parallel to the drone. Straight up.

Straight up doesn't get me more than 200m?

 

[GrammatonxXXxCleric]

Only thing I can think of that might be interfering would be your mobile device wifi. Try changing the channel used.

 

[miskairal]

Only thing I can think of that might be interfering would be your mobile device wifi. Try changing the channel used.

I have no idea how to do that but it's why I mentioned the device I use as I wondered if this was the issue. Too windy to test more this evening

 

[Bigbells]

Then all of a sudden the screen lost all colour and it said Disconnected. No RTH seemed to kick in but I was able to make it fly backwards toward me.

The signal has to be completely lost for a specific number of consecutive seconds (10 maybe?... I don't remember, but it's at least 10) before RTH will kick in. It can seem like an eternity, because if the signal briefly reestablishes, the clock starts all over again.

Some of us have developed extraordinary vision, wink wink, in order to maintain line of sight.

 

[miskairal]

Nothing I've ever read or seen has ever said to have the antenna the way it is in this YouTube clip but I think it's what I need to try.

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[GrammatonxXXxCleric]

Yes, having eaten loads of carrots as a kid I can now "see" my phantom 4 miles out.....

 

[skyacramer]

Try having someone else hold the phone a couple feet away from you


Sent from my iPhone using PhantomPilots

 

[miskairal]

Try having someone else hold the phone a couple feet away from you

Yeah, thought of that, which is pretty amazing for me as I can be slow Had hoped to get out this arv after work but it's trying to storm so will have to wait.. Thanks for the idea.

 

[GrammatonxXXxCleric]

Just to try it, put foil sheet between phone and antenna.

 

[SkyHog]

It's not a good idea to turn your antenna horizontal because that makes it cross-polarized with the receiving antenna in the bird. In theory, you lose 3db of your signal if you are 45 degrees off axis, but you get infinite loss (zero coupling between two antennas) if one antenna is perfectly horizontally polarized and the other is perfectly vertically polarized. Of course in the real world, there is no such thing as perfect polarization anyway. At reasonably short ranges you can easily get enough RF coupling to maintain some connection between cross polarized antennas, because it is practically impossible to maintain pure signal polarization throughout the propagation path no matter what you do. Signal reflections and other path anomalies would distort the received signal polarization in any case. But on the whole, you will be better off trying to match the polarization of the distant antenna, which in our case is a vertical monopole in the landing gear of the bird.

Having said all that, I don't doubt your test results at all. I can't explain why you got better results with the angled antenna, but there are several possibilities. It could be as simple as moving your antenna away from the interference generated by the phone, as someone else noted. I noticed in your picture that your antenna was only tilted about 45 degrees off vertical, which would degrade your signal only slightly from a polarization perspective, but still might be very beneficial if that moves away from RF noise generated by the phone. The video, on the other hand, showed a completely horizontal antenna, which I don't think is a good idea.

 

[JackA]

I like to keep the 5.8 antenna out of the 2.4 antennas face. I understand this is not really a technical issue, just my preference.