Hi all,
Context
We have just started using a Reach M+ with a Reach RS+ base station PPK set-up. We are flying our commercially-purchased drone over a tropical forest with tall trees and variable topography (<= 150m elevation). We have four flight paths, with each one being successively farther away from our take-off point. Today we did the first 3 and discovered that we lost connection with the controller (and data link loss) for roughly 6 periods ranging from 10 seconds to 4 minutes, 54 seconds. During this time, the drone continued with the flight plan and continued taking pictures.
I was processing the information in Emlid Studio this evening and found a mismatch between the events in the .pos file (277) and the images (288). I read through some previous discussions here such as this one and this one.
My thoughts
I believe the connection loss is leading to the missed events in the Reach M+. Here is a Google drive link that contains our logs.
Question
I have a few questions:
- Is the solution for the connection loss to simply move to a better location with the base station and controller? Would wrapping the Reach M+ in foil help with this?
- I’ve seen on previous discussions that a workaround is to manually alter the
.pos file. However, it is possible we will have many flights in the future that will involve connection loss. In that case, is there a reliable post-processing step we can take?
- I believe this is related to our situation, but would changing the settings in Emlid Studio help with this, such as in this topic? I did already try changing the Elevation mask to 5 degrees, Filter type = combined, and Integer Ambiguity Resolution to “Fix and hold”. It did increase the number of FIX points we had, but only by a small percentage.
Thanks!
Hi @mcgregorian1,
Welcome to our community!
Let me answer your questions.
Is the solution for the connection loss to simply move to a better location with the base station and controller? Would wrapping the Reach M+ in foil help with this?
A tropical forest could be a challenging environment for single-band receivers. For similar projects, we mostly suggest our multi-band receivers that can handle these types of conditions more easily. I checked your log and saw many gaps and cycle clips too. Most likely, these are the reasons for the connection loss and the difference between the events in your .pos file and your images. But I agree with your ideas. A better base location and the foil around the Reach M+ could improve the quality of the log.
I’ve seen on previous discussions that a workaround is to manually alter the .pos file. However, it is possible we will have many flights in the future that will involve connection loss. In that case, is there a reliable post-processing step we can take?
I’m afraid the only way to handle this is to modify the .pos file manually. But I hope your ideas will improve your setup and your connection issues will disappear.
I believe this is related to our situation, but would changing the settings in Emlid Studio help with this, such as in this topic 2? I did already try changing the Elevation mask to 5 degrees, Filter type = combined, and Integer Ambiguity Resolution to “Fix and hold”. It did increase the number of FIX points we had, but only by a small percentage.
It could indeed be a good solution to get more FIX. You tried the same settings that we usually recommend, but overall, if the quality of the log isn’t good enough, these changes won’t have much of an impact on the result.
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Hi @zoltan.biber ,
Thanks for your response. We have now tried another series of flights, and on one of them we had 98.9% FIX but we still had a mismatch of the photos compared to the events (here, 288 photos for 283 events).
Is there an easy way to tell which events are attributed to specific photos? That would help a lot with knowing which ones to include for building an orthomosaic. I included the most recent log files in the same google drive link from my original post.
