Phantom 3 Advanced Battery Life

[wflo927]

hovering in 30 Km/H wind is the same as flying at 30 Km/H when there is no wind. Still, thats not a very impressive result. Msinger says there is no break in period for phantom batteries, and its true I cant find any reference to it in the documentation, but I find it hard to believe DJI would not chemically stabilize its batteries to preserve their shelf life (and reduce fire risk etc in storage).

As it's only my second round of flights, I'll keep a close eye on the flight times for the next few flights. Is there a need to do a "deep" recharge or something similar that I read about in the past? I'll keep flying this week to see if the battery usage changes.

 

[wflo927]

How windy? Check uavforecast.com and input the altitudes you want to fly at. If you're going up at altitudes where the wind is 17-20mph it will affect your flight time. Besides, these are not appropriate wind speeds to fly at anyway. I do not fly in winds any stronger than 15mp. The phantom will handle heavy wind but it is not a good idea. If the winds you were flying in were more like 8-10mph, you're not getting good battery life at the moment for some reason.

Hi Shockwave ! interesting point you brought up. Looks like yesterday's wind gusts at 5-6PM were between 15-20 mph. Today's forecast shows 5-10mph. I'll go out today and confuct two similar flights on the 2 batteries and report back my findings !

 

[Vertigo]

DJI smart battery tips and usage

Relevant quote: "Take it easy on your new battery pack
A brand new battery can take a number of cycles to realise it full capacity so do not fully discharge a new pack for the first few cycles, ideally try not to discharge below 50% for the first 10 cycles"

Again though, this is not "official DJI" info, and I have no idea why DJI wouldnt inform their users of this rather typical lipo behavior, but it makes complete sense for the reasons I explained above.

 

[Numone]

I've had 158 flights. Flight times have varied from 11 to 22 minutes. Gentle flying in calm conditions gives 18/22 mins before the 30% warning. But energetic horizontal, vertical and hard turns at full throttle flying in calm conditions will give lower times, maybe 15 mins max. The highest wind speed I have even attempted to fly at in was 12mph with occasional gusts to 20mph.
I'd estimate the AC was leaning at 25/30 degrees in an attempt to to stay in hover. It was in this wind I achieved my highest speed of 41.8mph... It was hitting a max of 12mph in the opposite direction and the flight time was dropping like a stone. Battery stayed in tolerance. I brought it back at 30% and got 11 mins. Sounds to me like your times are OK.

 

[Klnyc]

I looked at 3 of my logs.
1) 18m 23.5s landing at 23% battery
2) 14m 41.4s landing at 33% battery
3) 20m 32.1s forced landing at 9% battery

mine is about that mark too. once I see blinking low battery that usually around 31%. I start calling back.

 

[wflo927]

Thanks for the heaps of useful information everyone ! Good to know that my flight times are on par with everyone else. Too bad Amazon Prime day doesn't have phantom batteries on sale...

Safe to assume most of you have about 3-4 batteries in your arsenal?

 

[msinger]

Safe to assume most of you have about 3-4 batteries in your arsenal?

3 is a good number if you plan to fly for about an hour each time you head out to fly. Add another battery on top of that for each additional 20 minutes you want to fly.

 

[Klnyc]

I have total of 5

 

[Ted Creighton]

Wind is your problem - like swimming upstream, takes more energy (and drones take more battery time flying into the wind - and crosswinds). Buy a couple of spare batteries - they are down to $100 per now - changing a battery takes 4 seconds. I have 4 batteries and can fly for a couple of hours now.