I. Intro
Date: 10/1/2023
We flew DJI M210 with H20T during night time to mimic a rescue mission. Jack and his girlfriend went into the field first. After a while, we took off and went for the searching.
II. Site Conditions
III. Flight Information
We set up the M210 with the checklist. The propellers,XT2, batteries, landing gears, GPS, and the SD card were loaded. After Jack and Hank solved the streaming problem, Jack headed to the north and hid. After six minutes, we took off. The facing of the XT2 was centered, I was just controlling the pitch, so the facing of the camera was the facing of the M210. This helped PIC to control the drone.
It’s recommended to fly in a grid pattern, but when we found the suspected object, the pattern was interrupted. Then the PIC never flew back to where we deviated, and the flight path was approximately parallel lines with a random orientation.
We found many deer because they were on the plain field and moving. Jack was so hard to find because he was behind the trees and the PIC never flew over there. A tree can block a large area if the drone is at the right angle and distance. The drone needs to cover more distance to see what’s on the other side of the trees.
IV. Reflection
- Compare equipment and ease of use.
XT2 was easy to use, but it’s recommended to install on gimbal 1 so we switched it during the test in the lab. It has two SD card slots. We used two SD cards just in case, but it was using the first one during the flight.
M210 has built in LED anti-collision light. It is more convenient than a Mavic.
- Safety concerns.
It’s night flight so we can’t see any object from the FPV camera, and the XT2 was looking down for rescuing, so lowering the height should be done with caution.
The anti-collision lights were the only objects we could see in the sky. The position, speed, and orientation information of M210 and near by aircrafts can only be obtained by telemetry.
During night time, a lot of insects were coming out. My arm was stung by a poisoned mosquito and the entire elbow was swallowing.
- Quality of imagery.
The XT2 doesn’t have the best quality, but at least we can distinguish the objects and see the temperature difference. There’s a difference between the environment and the heated object. The warm object is yellow, but some areas appear to be gray. This made our eyes difficult to find a stay-stilled object.
The stream doesn’t have audio, so the viewer may not know what we were doing and lose patience.