ianwood said:
So what other options have people tried outside of turning the Phantom into a three-legged stool? Does medium FOV eliminate much of the problem? I only ever use wide for night shots. How often does it show up in wide FOV?
Medium angle does make a difference, but depending on the flight conditions, eg. lots of wind, the landing gear can still appear in the shot, but much less often than wide.
Regarding the "three-legged stool" I'll just say that I'm an "out of the box" thinker and I look at different ways to solve different problems. If a set of landing gear could be fabricated from carbon fibre, and using only the two rear mount points on the Phantom, with the left lower rail slightly reduced in length, that would solve 99% of the problem.
The current DJI landing gear is not strong enough to support the Phantom, should someone try to modify the existing landing gear to this setup.
Another solution, would be to redesign a gimbal mount so that the gimbal was bought forward a few cms. But this may cause balance problems etc.
Actually, if DJI had just designed a gimbal where the GoPro lens was centred, we would have much less of this problem. It's a matter of trying to rectify their design shortcomings and I welcome reading other people's ideas.
I like the extended and widened landing gear concept, but the deal breaker for me is simple. It won't fit in my Phantom case, and there's no way in hell I'm going to be removing and re-installing the landing gear every time I want to fly.