When should you calibrate your compass?

[Adam L]

After reading online guides, and a countless amounts of YouTube tutorials, there has been nothing telling me when I should calibrate my compass of my P3S. It says in the manual to calibrate "when moving locations", which is brief, and only slightly helpful. Should it be calibrated when moving 20 ft, 20 yards, or 20 miles away from my most recent flight location? Should it be calibrated before every flight? Hoping you guys can help me here

 

[Meta4]

After reading online guides, and a countless amounts of YouTube tutorials, there has been nothing telling me when I should calibrate my compass of my P3S. It says in the manual to calibrate "when moving locations", which is brief, and only slightly helpful. Should it be calibrated when moving 20 ft, 20 yards, or 20 miles away from my most recent flight location? Should it be calibrated before every flight? Hoping you guys can help me here

You can safely fly for months without recalibrating your compass.
The basic idea is to get a good calibration and stick with it.
Unnecessary recalibration brings the risk of a bad calibration if you do it in the wrong area.
Read this thread to learn what compass calibration is all about and when it's necessary.
Compass Calibration, A Complete Primer

 

[RodPad]

After reading online guides, and a countless amounts of YouTube tutorials, there has been nothing telling me when I should calibrate my compass of my P3S. It says in the manual to calibrate "when moving locations", which is brief, and only slightly helpful. Should it be calibrated when moving 20 ft, 20 yards, or 20 miles away from my most recent flight location? Should it be calibrated before every flight? Hoping you guys can help me here

Welcome to the forum!
Yes, as @Meta4 said,

I think, I did my last one in May 2006?









No, not really, May 2016.

Rod

 

[tcope]

People will have different opinions on this. Some say to do it every time you fly.

Here is my take and reasoning. I recommend only doing the calibration when you fly something like 100-200 miles away and more so when this is an east./west movement. The compass calibration aligns the drone with magnetic north. If you move 10, 20, 5000 feet, this does not really change. Every time you do a compass calibration you open the door for something to go wrong. So if it's not needed, I say don't open that door. Will something go wrong? Probably not. Also, the app will also _help_ to let you know of an error.

I've driven 400 miles and not recalibrated. This was mostly moving south. I'd probably recommend a recalibration if going this far but I've gone that far a few times and never recalibrated.

 

[N017RW]

Compass calibration eliminates the 'Hard' & 'Soft' Iron distortions created by on-board ferromagnetic materials.

These are characterized and then essentially compensated or nullified when rotated with the magnetometer during calibration.


There is much info. available on this.
This is but one that I have found:
Magnetometer - VectorNav Library

I agree that East-West travel could induce the most change in declination as opposed to North-South. This kind of becomes obvious when looking at the mag. declination plots or 'maps'.

I have traveled 600 miles North of a/the previous cal. location with no need to re-cal there or upon return home.

 

[Adam L]

Thanks for the replies everyone! Really helpful