Home point

Will it be possible to use the transmitter location as the home point , rather than take off point. Two reasons , 1: I would like in a multiple battery flight to move to a sensible position to swap battery , and have drone land where I am when rth triggered, 2: on long fields say 600 m if I take off at one end , what I currently do is walk down the field after take off 100m so that I am legally flying within 500m (UK) VLOS ,but the app records the distance from takeoff point, so will record distance as 600m

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Hey @cratageus,

To my knowledge there is no easy way to change the home point mid flight, and depending on the drone the ground control station (RC) may not have its own GPS locator (for most consumer drones it takes advantage of the attached devices GPS signal ( a closer look at the specific models user manual may very well give you an option so its worth checking). I see the draw of being able to save some energy and time by being in a sensible place for a battery swap. You could work around this by landing manually instead of RTH at that sensible spot. Not perfect but should work, and you should be able to continue the mission from there.

As to the second thing, just to make sure i understand as i operate in the US; but in the UK they have a defined VLOS distance of 500m. Assuming this is correct and you are worried about compliance records (as the drone is going to say it was 600 m away from takeoff point in the log) you might be best served to stand in the middle of that distance so that each far point is now 300m radius away from the takeoff point.

it may not be perfect but these are some ideas of working around those issues.

Scott Lashmit

To my knowledge there is no easy way to change the home point mid flight, and depending on the drone the ground control station (RC) may not have its own GPS locator (for most consumer drones it takes advantage of the attached devices GPS signal ( a closer look at the specific models user manual may very well give you an option so its worth checking). I see the draw of being able to save some energy and time by being in a sensible place for a battery swap. You could work around this by landing manually instead of RTH at that sensible spot. Not perfect but should work, and you should be able to continue the mission from there.

As to the second thing, just to make sure i understand as i operate in the US; but in the UK they have a defined VLOS distance of 500m. Assuming this is correct and you are worried about compliance records (as the drone is going to say it was 600 m away from takeoff point in the log) you might be best served to stand in the middle of that distance so that each far point is now 300m radius away from the takeoff point.

it may not be perfect but these are some ideas of working around those issues.

I have a P4P with iPad Air with cell connection so the transmitter knows where it is, such that when flying a DD mission and I walk up the field the take off point stays where it is, but “my” location moves up map accordingly.
In DJI go you can set the home point to be transmitter and this is logged.
I was simplifying the 600m bit, yes VLOS is 500m and I do walk 100 m up field , and agree could go halfway, but some times the far side of a flight may be more than 500m if I did this. Taking of from field perimeter can make this complicated.
I also have done a job where I took off and started mission and was driving to far end of field (600m) to be at correct end when finished, when I realised it wasn’t taking pictures, so to cancel mission I went RTH , but couldn’t override so it went and landed at far end !

Ahhh the dreaded no photos taken, i have had that happen such a pain, I would think this might make a great feature request for the DRONEDEPLOY team to incorporate, may want to toss a thread up in the suggestion section of the forum, i can do that as well if you’d like(at least i can upvote too). Nothing like getting to one end of the field and having to walk back to the other.

It may not be ideal but you can use the same strategy i employ when mapping very large expanses, breaking up the maps into smaller plans (each meeting the legal VLOS requirements) and then compiling them into a larger map. i know it may seem kind of silly for an area of only a few hundred square meters but again i’m just trying to come up with workable solutions until a better one could be implemented.

Was this very important feature request granted? I was doing marine mapping with a Mavic from a boat last month and as you can imagine sometimes you have to shift towards the drone if the battery level is low or you current location gets choppy.