Flies good in heavy snow!

I just figured out how to flip a switch in settings to make the gimbal pan smoothly, after this flight.
 
I like the kind of probing, wandering camera movements. You might want to be careful flying in snow and fog though. I've read that both can cause moisture in your ESC's or flight controller, both of which can cause a crash or even bricking your Phantom.
 
Keep in mind (For those who don't know) - flying in this weather will drain your battery quickly and make your drone fall right out of the sky (because of the cold temps).

#KnowingIsHalfTheBattle
 
Keep in mind (For those who don't know) - flying in this weather will drain your battery quickly and make your drone fall right out of the sky (because of the cold temps).

#KnowingIsHalfTheBattle


It's a fairly manageable risk. My temperature floor for flying is -5 C. I keep my batteries on the inner pockets of a heavy down Carhartt parka that keeps me toasty personally until -45C, so they'll be nice and warm when I pop them in. They tend to cool down a bit during my preflight checks on the app, but they still take off at around 10C. Then I'll hover them until they hit 20C, and then start the mission. Then I keep a close eye on battery, and begin to think about returning or sticking around home at around 3.7 V, depending on what kind of terrain I'm flying to get back. This is how I manage the risks. I'm not guaranteeing it will always work, but some of us live in places where operating down to -5C can give us a good extra 90+ days/year in the air.

As long as it's not actively snowing, and it's not particularly windy, you should be fine if you're extra careful. Again I don't fly below -5C, and I also have a fair bit of RC experience to understand how Li-Po batteries perform in cold temperatures. Also it's not a good idea in my opinion (from RC experience, not Phantom experience) to fly in cold and windy conditions. First of all the extra forced convection will cool your quad faster (which could cause the battery temps to drop), but also your quad has to fight to keep position. Since the gimbal stabalizes a lot of that movement, you may not even notice it. Then if you start throwing wild moves in yourself, your ESC's could need to draw more power than you realize from the battery, and you could have some voltage sag, triggering a low voltage cutoff in the FC software.
 
Thanks for posting! I am one of those who live in southeast Saskatchewan, and wait (impatiently) for some decent weather.:)
 

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