Hey Guys, Just was wondering what people thoughts were about flying manually v.s. position hold. When is it better to with Position Hold and what are the advantages! It's super helpful but I find that I can't be as accurate while flying, but it does smooth out the image. Just wondering what you guys thought! Thanks, Mike
Manual flight 100% of the time...It's the best safe guard. What happens if your gps goes bananas and your heli ends up 'nose in' in a reverse drift away from you? can you recover from that? Are you skilled enough to correct and safely land? Don't trust your hobby grade auto pilot system, it should be considered as a backup and not primary. Ask this guy: or this guy: You want to be skilled like this guy Amazing recovery.
I have been asking myself this question and posed it to a wide variety of resources. Here's what I can tell you from my research. 1. A lot more accidents happen in GPS modes such as position hold, Come home mode or altitude control. I truely believe this is because more people fly in these modes and I believe that many of these accidents would still occur if they flew in manual mode because they had another condition that was causing issues. From what I have researched many people don't have their copters set up correctly or test their copters properly before using these functions. A lot of times these occur with inexperienced flyers that do not know how to fly their copters in manual mode. Some times inexperenced flyers lose their orientation as well and use features like carefree mode. Many people blame the electronics for flight mishaps where the problem was something else like poor CG, BL issues, or bad compass values. 2. Bad compass values and or calibration can affect even manual mode operation. Many people overlook the importance of calibrating every time they go out and fly. 3. There are some cases where electronics fail, but I see no more incidents where electronics fail because of a flight control board (non MK) going bad where it would crash in either case. The best advice I can recommend to you from months of research and advice from experienced flyers. 1. Get plenty of experience in manual mode, and learn to fly the copter from all types of situations and orientations so that you can recover quickly if something goes wrong. Make sure you can control the copter if boom one is at 3 or 9 oclock which I believe is the hardest to do. 2. Make sure you get plenty of navigation lights on your copter so that you can absolutely see where boom one is with respect to you. I got 12 LED clusters on the ends of booms 1 and 5 that angle down as well as small blinking LED's at the end of the booms that point straight out. I have small blinking LED's on the ends of booms 3 and 7. 3. Make sure your copter is balanced properly and the CG is good. This will help you maintain good health for your electronics and motors. 4. Make sure you calibrate your compass for every location you fly 5. For your first flight of the day make sure you do a small 10-15 second flight that goes no higher than 10-12 feet high and then bring it back down, and check the recorded GPX data on a laptop to look for any errors, BL issues, or temp problems. 6. Make sure you do the air pressure sensor mode so its less susptable to wind gusts. 7. Hot glue your critical plug on connections.
very good advice, numeber 5 I do the night before because when we are working we hardlly have time for this, i just keep a good eye on things on the graupner in the field. as for hot glue, its the best advice you can give, i had a CS8 flip on its head because a ribbon or molex connector came undone, and i had checked everything before lift off. i dont remember the last time we used gps function other than for testing it, we have it just as a fail safe, manual is the way to go, and if you can't fly well in manual, learn, pilot skills is what it all comes down to when you are competing for a job with a similar company with similar rigs.
Thanks so much for all this advice!! I am still learning and getting comfortable flying in Manual Mode especially keeping orientation! I do have LED lights for navigation, I can't imagine flying with out that! But really I am just trying to make sure this is copter is flying as smooth as safely as possible! My next phase is to dive into the PID and gyro parameters, and get an education how to properly set them!! Thanks for all the advice again guys! Love this forum!
My philosophy is to treat automation with respect. I treat it like my cat, sometimes its very calm and does what is expected to do and is your friend, but sometimes it can be very temperamental and bite you when you least expect it. I think it is a good tool for DP's when you need to recreate a shot precisely. There are limitations to it, such as external influences coming from highly magnetic areas or when the solar activity may be disrupting an ideal GPS signal, to name a few. I have seen my copter dance around the sky due to solar flare activity. It was not moving dangerously, but I was constantly having to re-correct the position with the dynamic PH functionality of the MK. This means that the copter was now thinking it was in a completely different spot than it actually was. RTL would have been unreliable that day had I needed to use it. It should be used sparingly, and you should never use it to replace basic flying skills. The people who get in trouble with it are those who take-off put in the AH and PH functions and fly willy nilly around the sky and are not prepared to quickly take over manual control until its too late and they crash. I did allot of testing with my MK avionics before even engaging the AH or PH functions to make absolutely sure there were no possible anomalies with its sensors. Once I was confident with it, I began testing it in an open area. I think as long as you are smart and follow the other peoples great advice on the subject you will be safe