So last time we got our Mavic Pro on a voyage of epic proportions when it clocked a whopping 11km. But some of you trolled us complaining we didn’t show the return journey! Oh well. Haters gonna hate, so this is for all the doubters! It’s got to be the craziest Mavic Pro flight test yet – 14.4km!!!
Mavic Pro has got 53% battery left after 7.2 km, we decided to let it return.It went back above the home point with 15% battery, which was 1.5 minutes to go, but we ordered it to go on flying.
After another 717m, 10% left, it was time to come back.
Home point again with 6%. Well, I thought we could have one more adventure…
It went another 191m, I really really think it needs to land.
Well, we actually made it fly:
(7210+717+191)*2＝16236m
OMG, 16.2km.
Is this the end of our test? Of course not!
We went on to test Mavic Pro, Xiaomi Mi Drone 1080p and Yuneec Typhoon H480 in downtown, to see how they work with heavy interferences in urban area.
Here is the result:
You might think these actual numbers is so much shorter than official ranges, are the manufacturers lying?
Well, the official transmission range is the maximum number acquired unobstructed. In real flight, this range will be affected by many factors.
Today I got a few more to say about video transmission. If you don’t know which drone to buy, get the one with better video transmission. Most drone companies are using digital video transmission on market, using 2.4 or 5.8 GHz.
Digital video transmission is convenient to use: just with a smart phone or tablet on RC, you can have the view. For middle-to-high end products, you can have quite good image quality of 720p or even 1080p, and a transmission range around 2km. Checking what you have shot is also easier.
Most low-end digital video transmission solutions are based on Wi-Fi. It costs fewer, but has many shortcomings: usually with longer latency, low anti-jamming ability and low channel availability.
Xiaomi Drone and Yuneec use Wi-Fi based transmission. As you can see I our test, Xiaomi Drone had a transmission range of only 360m, which mean it had very poor performance with interference.
In unobstructed environment, transmission range is closely related to transmitting power and band width. If the transmitting power increases, flight range would increase, while band width shrinks. In my point of view, so far Mavic Pro makes a best balance between transmitting power and band width.
Both OcuSync on Mavic Pro and previous LightBridge are digital video transmission systems. But OcuSync uses technologies similar to Software Defined Radio (SDR).
Comparing Mavic Pro and Phantom 4 in terms of transmission channel (shown in pictures below), you will see Mavic is more flexible.
LightBridge provides 13 channels between 2.400GHz-2.483GHz, the system will choose the channel automatically (10MHz/step).
DJI Phantom 4 HD Interface
OcuSync on Mavic will automatically choose channel (1Mhz/step) with less interference in its working spectrum, in order to reach a better effect of video transmission. When confronting severe jamming, Ocusync lower frequency to secure Mavic Pro.
Mavic Pro HD Interface
This test is not only about how far a drone can fly— also about flight controller and video transmission. Drones are not toys, but a flying camera.
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