First Waypoint vs Wind

Does DroneDeploy force the first waypoint to be the home point?

I have a DJI Mavic that is not effected by having landing gear in image as other drones are when flying crosswind. Therefore in windy conditions it seems logical to fly a lateral grid working downwind. Opposing legs should then have similar speeds and the aircraft will not have to work its way upwind during the survey.

So hypothetically I want to image a 100 acre field with a 15 - 20 mph northerly wind wind blowing up at 300 to 400’ reducing to only 5 mph down low below 100’. Start point of E-W survey legs is at top RH corner of field.

So in an ideal situation I would take off from near the centre of the field where I envisage the battery will run out. I load the mission so all is ready for take off. At this point I manually take off and fly upwind at 20’ AGL, well below the wind and locate the drone slightly upwind of the start survey point and hover. I then press the mission start/ Take off button and aircraft dutifully ascends to 400 feet. At this point instead of flying the 20 yards to the start survey point and commencing the mission, it flies all the way back to the home point at 400’ and does a 180 and tries to slog back into wind to the start of survey point into a 20mph headwind maybe only achieving 5 mph.

Am I missing something here? Is there a possibility that DroneDeploy could include a user option to exclude/skip homepoint from start of the uploaded flight plan. In this way user could take off setting home point, fly low beneath the wind to mission start point, commence mission and have aircraft work downwind towards you and homepoint. Thereby maximising endurance and mission feasibility.

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That would be nice and may likely occur in the future, but at this relatively early stage of development there are other foundational issues being focused on. This issue is a good idea but is not commonly heard.

Fair enough. The idea has probably not occurred to people. Logically it can have a large impact on time on task if there is an increasing wind gradient as you climb to mission Alt. It is also safer having the home point near where battery is envisaged to run low as DJI Low battery RTH does not account for wind. So if instead I took off on my hypothetical mission just upwind on start point and worked downwind the aircraft would not have been able to make it home & would have landed short. While it could only make 2 or 3 mph upwind it could readily fly at 20mph cross and downwind. Perhaps file it in the rainy day to do list :relaxed:

Thanks for the prompt reply though.