Jetmarine said:
72 hrs now no luck finding it but I did use My phone and satellite Map to view the possible Auto Landing Site This really helped in focusing in on where it might be. Tomorrow I might break out the Hubsan drone I originally purchased (B4 I upgraded and haven't flown since ) to check on some roof tops! LOL but why not?... Not sure If I would replace My FC40 with another or upgrade from It
That really sucks!!!!
Not sure if I'm kicking in an open door but have you checked the wind direction and speed and followed that path?
If you took off too early it probably couldn't get a GPS fix and switched or remained in Atti. In Atti the quad will move with the wind direction and with the wind speed, and that is faster than people might think. Within 2 minutes tops it would be out of range and could not return to home because of a lacking GPS home point. So it might have started to hover at some point, it should have gotten a GPS fix along the way, probably at the end of the Tx control range. So you should look at a circle with a radius of 500-600 meters (and further perhaps) focussing on the down wind vector.
It looks obvious but I thought it might help maybe.
Good luck, I just took my bird 400 meters high and 100 meters over the lake, just after dinner, and coming back and reading this turns my stomach around.
There's something emotional about having a quad flying away from you, it really sticks as a memory. I flew my first quad over the lake never to be seen again, the wind took it and I lost orientation. Every movement I tried seemed to make the quad going further away. Truth is, the wind was much stronger than I expected and the quad simply couldn't get home up wind, or it had such a slow groundspeed up wind, that it wasn't notable from where I stood. It was a non GPS quad (RC Logger Eye Xtreme) with very limited LED indication. I still can photographically remember how I watched it disappearing as a very tiny dot in the evening sky.
Good luck, I really hope you find it. Miracles do exist, I hope... for this once.
Jan